AWS and EkStep Collaborate to Foster and accelerate innovation in Digital Public Infrastructure

Amazon Web Services (AWS) India Private Limited today announced that it is collaborating with EkStep Foundation (EkStep), a non-profit organisation in India focused on catalysing societal transformation.

Together, the two organisations have established a Joint Innovation Center (JIC) to help foster the development of innovative digital solutions for public service delivery.

This joint effort will focus on enabling and accelerating the creation of digital public goods (DPGs) and digital public infrastructures (DPIs).

It aims to support both public sector and commercial institutions in building and harnessing digital solutions for population-scale use while helping governments build socially and digitally inclusive economies.

The JIC is a customer-centric program that is founded on Amazon’s culture of innovation philosophy, which encourages builders to work backwards from end-customer needs, use data to drive decision making, and adopt an iterative approach to solution development for successful outcomes.

According to the Nasscom-Arthur D. Little report Digital Public Infrastructure of India Accelerating India’s Digital Inclusion, the economic value addition from DPIs to India’s GDP has the potential to grow 3x – from 0.9% in 2022 to 2.9 – 4.2% by 2030.

The JIC by AWS and EkStep will be a mechanism to bring together key stakeholders who are committed to driving digital cooperation for a more equitable and sustainable world.

These stakeholders include owners and developers of DPGs/ DPIs; enablers like startups, independent software vendors (ISVs), and system integrators (SIs); and adopters/ implementers like governments, multilateral organisations, and private sector entities.

The JIC will promote collaboration among these stakeholders to develop DPGs and DPIs for sectors such as education, agriculture, finance, healthcare, and climate change, and help accelerate societal transformation.

The JIC will focus on supporting startups, ISVs, and SIs to leverage the power of technologies such as cloud computing, generative artificial intelligence (AI), and analytics from AWS; help them imagine and invent new use cases for DPGs and DPIs, incubate them, and enhance existing ones; and offer comprehensive starter kits for states and countries interested in such solutions.

To enable ease-of-use and faster adoption, the DPGs and DPIs will be packaged for one-click deployment via the AWS Partner Network (APN), which features more than 130,000 partners from more than 200 countries.

AWS will explore featuring the DPGs on AWS Marketplace, providing a global channel to showcase and distribute the solutions.

AWS will further explore featuring the DPGs and DPIs on the Open Government Solutions Catalog, which provides government organisations with valuable resources such as digital solutions, policies, and standards, enabling them to explore and reuse proven approaches to digital transformation.

The JIC further propels the scope for innovation and driving scalable impact from India, where a wide range of open-source based digital solutions have been pioneered to benefit citizens at scale.