Digital Public Goods Interoperability: A Low-Code Middleware Approach

Digital Public Goods (DPGs) play a vital role in achieving the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in low-income and middle-income countries. However, the lack of interoperability among different DPGs could lead to duplication of efforts and/or lack of (inter)-functionality since one DPG is not able to benefit from the features of another. This paper illustrates the need for interoperability, the difficulty of retrofitting interoperability in the numerous mature DPG projects and introduces a middleware application as a solution. The middleware application is a lightweight, technology-agnostic, portable, and modular application which facilitates transactions between the integrating system and the integrated system. By customizing and deploying the middleware, integrating system developers can save time and costs, reducing barriers to prototyping and increasing the adoption rate of DPGs. Furthermore, developers do not need to provision or access a sandbox as the middleware supports mocking responses. A use case involving the integration of two DPGs, a digital identity system and a health information system, is illustrated. The paper also describes future enhancements to the generalizability of the middleware from 1-to-any to any-to-any as well as improving security resilience with WebAuthn and custom cyber-security hardening tools and procedures.