Deputy Director, DPI Emerging Innovations and Functional Team

The Foundation

We are the largest nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world. Founded on a simple premise: people everywhere, regardless of identity or circumstances, should have the chance to live healthy, productive lives. We believe our employees should reflect the rich diversity of the global populations we aim to serve. We provide an exceptional benefits package to employees and their families which include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, foundation-paid retirement contribution, regional holidays, and opportunities to engage in several employee communities. As a workplace, we’re committed to creating an environment for you to thrive both personally and professionally.

The Team

The Global Growth & Opportunity (GGO) division works to catalyze sustainable and transformative socio-economic change. In the face of inequities and market failures, GGO seeks to realize the potential of untapped markets, and ensure that economic and social benefits reach everyone. We focus on the areas of Agricultural Development; Digital Public Infrastructure; Inclusive Financial Services; Global Education, Nutrition, and Water, Sanitation & Hygiene. We seek solutions that are sustainable, transformative, and inclusive with an eye toward applying technology innovations as well as data evidence to drive change in the world’s developing countries.

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is a set of digital systems that enables countries to safely and efficiently provide economic opportunities and deliver social services. DPI spans the entire economy, connecting people, data, and money in much the same way that roads and railways connect people and goods. Countries that build safe and inclusive DPI can create a vibrant and competitive economy, foster trust between governments and citizens, and deliver essential services and create economic opportunity across many sectors—including finance, health, and agriculture. Safe and inclusive DPI can ultimately help advance progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals and ensure that everyone can prosper, especially women and people with the lowest incomes.

The DPI team focuses on enabling a model for digital transformation that is inclusive, equitable, collaborative and helps accelerate the sustainable development goals. While DPI is an evolving concept, there is a growing consensus on it being a combination of (i) foundational, modular, interoperable, reusable, and scalable digital building blocks that enable creation of technologies for public interest such as identity, payments, and trusted data-sharing; (ii) a set of principles for enabling governance, regulations, and safeguards to ensure competitive markets and mitigate risks; and (iii) a community of public, private, academic, and civil society stakeholders working together to drive innovation, inclusion, and large scale impact through user-centric services and products. Several key foundational categories of DPI include identifiers, registries, electronic signatures, consent mechanisms, and AI/Machine Learning models.


The Gates Foundation is focusing its initial DPI efforts on supporting countries in building the three core elements of DPI: 1) Digital identity systems, which enable the creation, management, and authentication of unique identities for use in digital scenarios, 2) Digital payment systems, which enable governments, businesses, and individuals to instantly send and receive money, regardless of who hosts the underlying accounts, and 3) Data exchange systems, which enable individuals, organizations, and governments to safely share digital information.

The foundation’s digital payments work is overseen by our Inclusive Financial Systems team, while the DPI manages our work on digital identity and data exchange.

Our work on digital identity is more mature and moving to scale. We seek to leverage our team’s expertise in digital identity systems to lead a global learning agenda on other emerging DPI areas, including, but not limited to:

Trusted data sharing: shape inclusive & responsible data-sharing ecosystems with an aim to show how secure and efficient data sharing can unlock access to essential public services, improve governance, and foster innovation while protecting privacy.

Voice technologies and Language AI: explore how AI-driven voice technologies and language tools can ensure that digital services are accessible to everyone, regardless of literacy or language.

By establishing open, standardized, and interoperable systems for performing these functions, DPI can enable more inclusive economic participation, more effective delivery of public services, and more