Our vision
The pandemic has proven the potential of digital solutions in the context of social protection. Despite widespread recognition of the benefits that digital solutions can unleash, countries are struggling to fully realise them. Even though social protection programmes follow a common set of processes, fragmented social protection information systems are unable to communicate with other systems. This lack of harmonisation and interoperability not only impacts on social protection outcomes, but also leads to wasted public expenditure.
Standards For Interoperability
The Digital Convergence Initiative (DCI) has the goal to address this lack of interoperability by building global consensus on technological standards and guidelines for digital systems that enable interoperability, the seamless flow of data between programmes and institutions, which is essential to the delivery of social protection. We believe that meaningful data sharing can improve the effectiveness of social protection programmes and enhance their outcomes. When the different systems involved in delivery of social protection integrate as different pieces of the puzzle (as in figure on the right) based on global standards, it will lead to seamless and real time data flows for service delivery.
DCI is setting up Standards Committees, who facilitate consensus building on the draft standards created by a standard drafting group. through an open and consultative process. The Organizational, Semantic and Technical interoperability, aligned with the European Interoperability Framework, will be achieved through process, data and API standards.