Thousands of reliable open-source solutions exist that can help countries address pressing development challenges. At the same time, an estimated 80% of government digital transformation projects fail to achieve their planned objectives.
With this conundrum in mind, we met with hundreds of developers, engineers, and tech innovators at the recent Open-Source Summit in Japan. One of our roles as part of the broader digital public goods community, including the Digital Public Goods Alliance, was to collectively explore how we can bridge the gap between what is technically possible and what gets effectively deployed and adopted to advance long-term development impact.
Digital X 3.0, focused on human security, bridges innovative open-source solutions with real-world development challenges by supporting their adoption and scaling through UNDP’s global network.
Across the world, there are several examples already demonstrating the art of the possible. For example, Linux powers more than 96 percent of the world’s top one million web servers. OpenSSL is an open-source technology that secures millions of encrypted connections daily, protecting everything from bank transfers to private messages. OpenMRS supports electronic medical records for more than 22 million patients in over 80 countries.
These are not niche solutions, they are already serving billions. Yet awareness of these solutions is limited, with many governments often not knowing how to find, evaluate, or adopt these tools. This is where Digital X 3.0 is stepping to fill the gap.
The Four Freedoms and Human Security
Open source is more than just free software; it reflects principles that align closely with human security. The concept of human security, places individuals and communities at the heart of development efforts, ensuring their protection from critical threats while empowering them to shape their own futures with dignity and agency.
Open source operates around ‘Four Freedoms’, that include the freedom to inspect, use, modify, and distribute software. These freedoms directly map to the principles of human capability and agency. When communities can inspect code, they build technical literacy and transparency that bolster both personal autonomy and collective knowledge. When they can use software without restrictions, powerful technologies remain accessible to journalists, farmers, activists, and communities regardless of economic resources. When they can modify software, users can adapt tools to their specific contexts, such as customizing climate monitoring systems to local environmental conditions or tailoring financial platforms to national regulations. When people can distribute software freely, innovations spread rapidly across communities facing similar challenges. These freedoms enable power to become distributed rather than centralized, and innovation can flourish because solutions can be adapted to local challenges.
Why the gap exists, and where UNDP and Japan are working to solve
If the technology exists and the need is urgent, why does the gap persist? The answer lies in several interconnected challenges.
First, government IT procurement systems tend to favour familiarity. Government procurement frameworks are designed around traditional vendor relationships with clear liability, support contracts, and predictable costs. Open-source solutions challenge this model as they require evaluating communities rather than companies, assessing distributed maintenance rather than service-level agreements, and accepting shared responsibility rather than single-vendor accountability. Without procurement reform, even aware governments struggle to justify open-source adoption within existing compliance frameworks.
Second, the total cost of ownership remains opaque. While open-source eliminates licensing fees, governments often underestimate the investment required for skilled personnel, ongoing maintenance, security updates, and institutional knowledge retention. Proprietary vendors bundle these costs into predictable contracts; open-source requires governments to build internal capacity or coordinate multiple service providers – a capability most lack. This makes cost comparison difficult and risk assessment subjective.
Third, political incentives favour visible deliverables over sustainable infrastructure. Elected officials need to demonstrate progress within short political cycles. Implementing proprietary solutions offers clear launch dates, vendor accountability, and tangible outcomes. Building open-source capacity is a longer-term investment with diffuse benefits that materialize beyond election cycles. Without strong technical leadership at senior levels, short-term political imperatives consistently override strategic technology decisions.
Fourth, there are few trusted intermediaries for discovery and guidance. The open-source ecosystem is vast and decentralized (e.g. thousands of solutions exist across fragmented repositories, communities, and platforms) with relatively few advisors to navigate this landscape, match solutions to specific needs, and provide unbiased assessment of technical maturity, community health, and implementation readiness.
Taking action
The Digital X 3.0 project, supported by Japan, offers a curated catalogue of mostly open-source solutions that have been deployed and validated in real-world development contexts – helping match what exists with what’s needed.
Closing that gap requires collaboration, not any single organization. Our event at the Open-Source Summit – Open-Source Innovation for Human Security and Sustainable Development: the UNDP Digital X 3.0 Showcase – put this into practice. Convening Japan’s open-source, foreign development and technology community.
If you are a Japanese company, startup, or non-profit building open-source solutions for digital identity, agricultural data, health information, civic participation, or other development challenges – we want to hear from you.
You can learn more about the Digital X Catalogue here or contact us here.
