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Digital infrastructure

Building public-interest digital systems for accountability and resilience

🧭 Purpose

As the EU and its partners expand investment in digital infrastructure through mechanisms such as the European Investment Bank (EIB), European Investment Fund (EIF), and InvestEU, these investments increasingly shape the global information environment.

Digital finance, data connectivity, and cloud systems are now essential to both economic growth and democratic resilience — but they also carry significant human-rights, transparency, and accountability risks when left solely to market forces.

Embedding information integrity and human-rights safeguards into all digital-infrastructure financing ensures that Europe’s development and investment policies uphold the same democratic values they aim to promote.

⚖️ Opportunities and Challenges

Opportunities

  • Public-interest technology leadership: The EU can set a global standard by integrating democracy and rights safeguards into digital-infrastructure finance.

  • Inclusive growth: Investments in secure and interoperable systems can lower costs, expand access, and support SMEs and local media.

  • Resilience and accountability: Transparent infrastructure strengthens trust in digital financial systems and reduces vulnerabilities to manipulation and cybercrime.

Challenges

  • Market concentration: Over-reliance on dominant cloud and platform providers can entrench digital monopolies and dependency.

  • Weak rights enforcement: Many infrastructure projects lack robust human-rights or data-protection assessments.

  • Capacity gaps: Smaller organisations and local governments often lack technical or legal expertise to evaluate and negotiate digital-infrastructure contracts.

🧩 Strategic Recommendations

1. Embed Transparency and Human-Rights Safeguards

  • Require comprehensive human-rights and risk impact assessments for all EU-financed digital-infrastructure projects.

  • Publish assessments and evaluations to ensure accountability and public oversight.

  • Align due-diligence procedures with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

2. Invest in Resilient, Secure, and Inclusive Systems

  • Prioritise secure, affordable, interoperable digital financial infrastructure that serves citizens and small enterprises, not only governments or large corporations.

  • Ensure cybersecurity and privacy-by-design principles are built into project design from the outset.

  • Focus on interoperability and accessibility, so systems can be used across borders and by diverse communities.

3. Support Shared Public-Interest Infrastructure

  • Fund shared cloud, cybersecurity, and analytics services that reduce costs and dependency for smaller organisations, including SMEs and local media outlets.

  • Promote the use of open-source and public-interest technologies in EU-financed digital systems.

  • Encourage regional cooperation on digital-governance standards and cross-border data protection.

4. Strengthen Accountability through Partnerships

  • Establish public-private-civil society partnerships to monitor the governance of large-scale digital projects.

  • Coordinate with EU Delegations, Member States, and regional partners to ensure that technology investments reinforce, rather than undermine, information integrity.

  • Include independent digital-rights experts in the design and evaluation of EU-financed projects.

🧑‍🎓 Learn from Practice

Building Shared, Safe, and Affordable Infrastructure

  • The Journalism Cloud Alliance (JCA) brings together news organisations and civic-tech actors to share secure hosting, storage, and analytics infrastructure, reducing dependency on commercial providers.

  • Regional data-governance initiatives in Africa and Latin America are developing open, privacy-preserving models for public data use — demonstrating that inclusive, rights-based infrastructure is feasible at scale.

  • EU-funded cybersecurity pilots under Horizon Europe have supported the adoption of open-source encryption tools and cloud-migration frameworks for civil-society and media partners.

What Works

  • Combining technical assistance with financial support ensures capacity for safe, sustainable infrastructure use.

  • Cross-sector collaboration between finance, governance, and media strengthens system accountability.

  • Transparency reporting and open contracting practices build trust and enable public scrutiny.

💡 Key Takeaway

Digital infrastructure is the backbone of modern governance — and its integrity determines the resilience of democracies. By investing in secure, interoperable, and rights-respecting systems, the EU can ensure that its financing for development advances both digital innovation and democratic accountability.

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