Commonwealth - Lesotho: on locally-owned, sustainable digital infrastructure

The Commonwealth asked me to present to their digital infrastructure policy group, chaired by the Government of Lesotho.

Presentation

Notes on Speech

Thank you Radika for inviting me to present today.

Thank you to Mr. Jammeh and the Government of the Gambia for inviting me as well. Thank you to the Government of Lesotho for allowing me to present.

Intro

• Introduce myself
• Our organization is committed to advancing the sustainable development of digital infrastructure

Taxonomy

• There is a lack of definition of what we talk about when we talk about digital infrastructure, the economy, etc.
• We collaborated with Commonwealth a model of thought that we can use to communicate and develop policy
• Explain the model
• Use E-Commerce

Investing

• Most of it is free
• Need investment in skill development on software development - not engineering - and product marketing
• Seed capital is needed to purchase the digital resources needed to power the digital product for a period of finding product-market fit
• In the western world, the ‘seed capital’ for digital resources is provided through credits by the large-scale cloud providers who use it to lock in startups in their ecosystem

Digital infrastructure

Obviously, access to the market is critical through investments in fiber infrastructure

Digital infrastructure is essentially only two components - providing debt facilities or financing for the equipment itself, servers, storage, and network

Refurbished hardware can drastically reduce the costs of investment and should be favored from a sustainability perspective as well

The buildings themselves are warehouses with power & cooling needs - they can be perfectly combined with building traditional energy infrastructure such as power lines (fiber), power plants (data centers), or district cooling systems

Two examples show the point

Sweden Fiber coverage = high voltage power lines

Data centers = look like power plants already

If you want to dive in more

We wrote a report 3 years ago about how to co-create digital & energy infrastructure as a new utility alongside water, power, and internet access.

Doing so creates a better energy system, which is more environmentally friendly but also drastically reduces the costs of each.