By Ofovwe Aig-Imoukhuede

There is a version of Africa’s digital future that is genuinely exciting: digital identity systems that give every citizen access to the services they are entitled to: health data platforms that allow governments to anticipate crises rather than react to them. The infrastructure exists, at least in concept, to fundamentally transform the relationship between African states and their people, and to reposition the continent not merely as a recipient of global digital solutions, but as a producer of them.

But infrastructure, digital or otherwise, does not run itself. This is where the real conversation needs to begin. The question is not whether Africa can build the infrastructure. It is whether the organisations responsible for it, and the incentives and accountability structures around them, are capable of owning it.

Ownership matters here more than it is given credit for. Not legal ownership of the asset, but individual ownership and system-level accountability for outcomes, the kind that becomes visible when things get difficult. It is the civil servant who continues to champion a digital platform through multiple changes in political leadership and still believes in it. It is the regulator that enforces data governance standards even when it is commercially or politically inconvenient to do so. It is the public administrator who treats digital transformation not as a project to be signed off on, but as a reform to be led, with all the persistence, adaptation, and accountability that requires.

At the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation, we have spent years working at the intersection of public sector reform and service delivery, and what we have learned is both simple and consequential: the performance of any system, however well designed or well-funded, is ultimately bounded by the capacity of the people operating it and by the incentives, accountability and operating norms that shape how it is used. This is the same constraint that will define the success or failure of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI).

Without ownership, DPI initiatives risk following a familiar pattern: strong launches, impressive pilot numbers and then a gradual drift back to the status quo. This happens because underlying processes were never truly replaced and because those responsible for delivery are never truly accountable for outcomes. The failure, almost always, is not technical. It is a failure of incentives, accountability and organisational alignment.

This is why the conversation around DPI in Africa cannot remain focused solely on architecture; on interoperability standards, data governance frameworks, and investment pipelines, important as those things are. It must also ask, seriously and honestly: do the public administrations responsible for deploying and stewarding this infrastructure have the leadership, the skills, and the operating environment to do so effectively?

The countries that have moved from pilot to scale, from announcement to measurable delivery, have invested deliberately and in advance in these human and institutional foundations. They have developed public servants who understand not only the technology, but the policy and operational context in which they must function. They have put in place accountability structures that give reformers the space to act and citizens the ability to demand results. They recognise that this kind of ownership has to be built into how systems operate; it cannot be assumed after the fact.

Africa has the ambition and, crucially, the talent. What is required now is a corresponding shift in how public systems are structured and managed:  sustained investment in leadership pipelines, stronger accountability mechanisms, and governance cultures that support delivery. The technical architecture matters. The people and the systems that enable them to perform matter more.

Aig-Imoukhuede is Executive Vice-Chair, Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation.