Digital public infrastructure, or DPI, reframes a question governments have answered the wrong way for two decades. Instead of digitizing each public service on its own, it asks what shared layers everyone can build on. The cleanest image is a highway: a government does not pave it for state vehicles alone, but for public and private traffic alike, and what runs over it is not all owned by whoever laid the road. DPI applies that logic to identity, payments, and data exchange, the foundational rails a digital economy runs on.
In this episode of Sovra Podcast, Lucas Jolías speaks with Manuel Aguilera, Regional Lead for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure (CDPI), an advisory center hosted at IIIT Bangalore in India. A sociologist who came to digital government through public policy rather than engineering, Manuel advises governments while staying deliberately technology-agnostic, selling them nothing, which is precisely what makes his read useful: he sees DPI as a question of institutions and incentives first, and technology second. The conversation traces how the paradigm took shape, why India’s constraints produced its clarity, where Latin America genuinely leads, and what the region has to solve in the next five years.
What You Will Hear
1. DPI is a paradigm shift, not a faster portal. The earlier waves of digital government focused on solutions: build a system, build a citizen-facing process, build a single web page on top of the systems already scattered across ministries. DPI starts somewhere else. It treats identity, payments, and data exchange as shared infrastructure, the pipes underneath that most people never see but that everything else depends on. The shift is from digitizing the state point by point to laying foundations the entire economy can reuse.
2. Why it has to serve more than the state. Manuel’s sharpest framing is the highway. If a government builds digital infrastructure only for its own services, it has built a faster bureaucracy, not infrastructure. The test is whether banks can reuse it, startups can build on it, and a digital economy can grow on top of it. That is the difference between a government project and genuine public infrastructure, and it echoes the adoption gap that Aura Cifuentes described in Ep. 7: countries that issued digital IDs but whose citizens still carry paper, because no other institution accepts the credential.
3. The India lesson: design for adversity. DPI’s design philosophy comes from a context engineered to fail. India had 200 languages, 1.4 billion people, deep inequality, and very low digital literacy at the moment these systems were being built, with roughly 40% of the population lacking any identity document. Designing for that adversity is what forced the minimalist approach: small building blocks that each do one thing well, portable enough to run on any device. Manuel describes a postal office where a clerk with an Android phone reads your fingerprint and opens a bank account on the spot. Adversity, not abundance, produced the elegance.
4. The missing role: a neutral advisor. DPI is still an emerging field, which means most of the people advising governments have a stake in the answer: suppliers selling a product, multilaterals lending the funds, internal actors each seeing one part of the problem. CDPI exists to fill the gap as a technology-agnostic advisor that does not sell governments anything and is not committed to any single solution. Whether a government wants open source, a vendor, a SaaS model, or on-prem, the center’s job is to help it evaluate maturity, read the architecture, and avoid getting trapped in a contract it does not understand.
5. Brazil is doing it by the manual. Asked where the region leads, Manuel points to Brazil. PIX, the instant-payment rail launched around the pandemic, collapsed the barrier to digital payments so completely that street vendors now assume you will pay with it. Brazil pairs that with a national data-exchange concept that lets the state act proactively, and this year with ECA Digital (Lei 15.211/2025), which moves age verification off the user’s self-declaration and onto the platform, and builds it as public policy so any company, not only the largest, can perform the check. Brazil is also piloting verifiable credentials, including using them for age verification at national scale, an application Manuel says he had not seen anywhere else.
6. The next five years are regional. The biggest challenge ahead is integration. Manuel frames it as a citizen question: how do we make sure a driver’s license is verified automatically in any country in the region, and a university degree is recognized anywhere without friction? Latin America carries a paradox here, rich in supranational organizations yet thin on actual integration and intra-regional trade. Only Brazil, and perhaps Mexico, is large enough to prioritize national systems alone; everyone else needs the shared rails. The second challenge is inclusion: the shift to a digital economy is, in his view, close to inevitable, and the open question is whether it lifts people in or rebuilds the technological monopolies the internet already produced.
Key Quotes
“If the government is going to build digital infrastructure, it cannot think only about its own services. Banks should be able to reuse it, startups should be able to reuse it, an entire digital economy can be built on top of it.”
“India had everything to get it wrong: 200 languages, 1.4 billion people, deep inequality, very little digital literacy. Designing for that adversity is what forced solutions that are minimal, portable, and work on any device.”
“People come to me wanting to measure a country’s level of maturity, and I ask: which country? Which country within each country? The region is that heterogeneous.”
“How do we make sure my driver’s license can be verified automatically in any country in the region, and my university degree recognized anywhere without too much friction?”
“The real question is whether the transition to a digital economy will be inclusive, or whether it will generate the new technological monopolies we already lived through with the internet.”
About the guest
Manuel Aguilera is the Regional Lead for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure (CDPI), an advisory center hosted at IIIT Bangalore that helps governments design and implement DPI while staying deliberately technology-agnostic. A sociologist with a Master’s in Public Administration from University College London, he came to the field through public policy rather than engineering. Before CDPI he co-founded Impacto Digital, a civic-tech organization building technology for human rights across Latin America, and has advised organizations including UNESCO and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. His distinctive lens is institutional: he reads DPI as a question of incentives, neutrality, and who gets to build, before it is a question of stacks.
More from Sovra
🎥 Manuel Aguilera: DPI and Interoperability (Gov3 Summit 2025) — the guest’s own talk, a deeper dive into the regional interoperability argument at the center of this episode.
🎧 [PODCAST] Ep. 8: From Estonia to Argentina (with Gustavo Giorgetti) — the interoperability layer underneath Manuel’s regional vision, and how Argentine provinces federated through X-Road.
🎧 [PODCAST] Ep. 7: From Digitalization to Infrastructure (with Aura Cifuentes) — the adoption gap Manuel returns to: IDs issued, paper still carried.
📖 How the Mobile Driver’s License Works — the credential standard behind “a license that verifies in any country.”
📖 The Full Lifecycle of a Verifiable Credential — how the technology Brazil is piloting actually issues, holds, and verifies trust.
Continue the conversation
Explore the standards and building blocks behind these ideas at sovra.io/knowledge, our hub for digital identity and verifiable credentials. Sovra builds the infrastructure layer this conversation describes, from SovraID for verifiable credentials to SovraChain for the trust layer underneath cross-border verification.
We read every response, so reply and tell us where your country sits on the regional-interoperability question. Forward this to someone building in government or fintech.
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