Pacific Island Countries (PICs) have articulated a vision for their shared digital future, but the journey is tumultuous–a build-up of pilots, a dearth of scalable systems, and investments that rarely adapt across the region’s 14 diverse countries. This brief argues that the current supply-side model of digital transformation—which starts with connectivity and assumes adoption to be inevitable—fails in a part of the world characterised by linguistic diversity, community-led governance models, land dispersal, and small populations. An alternative model, which approaches the challenge from a value perspective of starting from the impact goal and tracing back to the necessary infrastructure, is proposed instead. The brief argues that integrating the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) approach with artificial intelligence could allow PICs to build shared foundational technologies while preserving national sovereignty, cutting costs, creating demand for local expertise, and enabling service delivery in hundreds of languages. Using the region’s tradition of wayfinding and collective management models as inspiration, the elements needed for success in this effort will be described.
The ancestors of the Pacific Islands navigated 30 million sq km of open ocean without instruments, using stars, wave patterns, and bird flight. They were the world's greatest navigators— finding their way across vast and uncertain expanses through ingenuity. Today, Pacific Islanders have a similar opportunity: To draw on that tradition of wayfinding and use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the DPI approach as new navigation tools to chart their digital transformation towards inclusive growth. The journey will not be easy, but the region’s extraordinary diversity and local contexts make a tailored approach necessary.
(The views expressed are personal)
This paper can be accessed here.
This paper is authored by Alok Gupta, ORF.