The United States Agency for International Development is developing a digital tool to help it assess the “digital ecosystem” of countries it assists.

The tool, called the Digital Ecosystem Country Assessment (DECA), will be piloted in Colombia and Kenya starting in January, according to Michelle Parker, a senior policy adviser at USAID’s Center for Digital Development. The USAID team plans to identify two more countries to pilot the tool in and refine it until August, when USAID plans to formally launch it.

“In order to understand what is happening in a country’s digital ecosystem, we need to be able to assess it,” said Parker, speaking Dec. 3 at the Professional Services Council Development Summit in Washington. The development team is building the tool “pretty much from scratch,” she added.

To build the assessments, USAID, which provides aid to foreign civilians living in underdeveloped nations, will score the country’s digital governance, censorship, regulations, digital financial services, platforms and access and use to evaluate a country’s digital ecosystem. Parker said the the agency wants to be able to share some information publicly to help coordinate with its different donors across the world in how they approach investment in other countries digital ecosystems.

This tool is just one part of USAID’s first-ever digital strategy, which is scheduled to be released early next year, officials said. Through the strategy, USAID wants to go “digital by default,” agency officials said, shifting to a mindset where using digital platforms is the forethought, not a second- or third-tier option.

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The agency is discussing potentially “mandating” digital payments, digital data collection, principles for digital development and cybersecurity and data privacy, Parker said.

“We’re going to figure out what the package of requirements on this digital space looks like,” Parker said.

Chris Burns, director of the Center for Digital Development, said that the “biggest challenge” for the agency is digital literacy, especially has the agency deploys new tools in different countries. Another significant challenge for USAID as it deploys digital tools is balancing the opportunities it provides with the risks they pose. USAID operates with the phrase “do no harm” at its core. But some users may not understand the risk.

“How do we ensure that people who are accessing these services know how to do so safely, know how to do so with their privacy in mind, and know how to do so just in terms of general literacy so they can embrace, to the fullest extent, these technologies,” Burns said.

Creating the digital strategy while keeping up with the rapid pace of technological innovation is not easy, especially since USAID has to be prescient while crafting the strategy with some lessons learned over the last few years.

“We recognize that if we were putting out a strategy two or three years ago, it would look remarkably different than it looks like today,” said Burns. “But we also know that we’re trying to put a strategy that’s going to cover the next five years and even though we can’t forecast what that looks like, we have to be mindful of being adaptive even within the strategy to be able to continue to balance those opportunities and risk.”

About Andrew Eversden

Andrew Eversden covers all things defense technology for C4ISRNET. He previously reported on federal IT and cybersecurity for Federal Times and Fifth Domain, and worked as a congressional reporting fellow for the Texas Tribune. He was also a Washington intern for the Durango Herald. Andrew is a graduate of American University.

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