Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is increasingly positioned as a foundation for expanding access to public services, strengthening state capacity, and enabling more inclusive digital societies. As governments and philanthropic leaders around the world invest in digital identity systems, data exchange layers, and digital payments, a central question continues to surface: how is trust built, sustained, and experienced in practice?
In a previous blog on trust and DPI, I explored how trust is not a single attribute that can be designed into a system once and for all. Rather, it is layered. It is built thanks to iterative and consistent moments, actions and solutions that “fill” the marble jar of digital trust. Trust in DPI depends on multiple, interconnected dimensions: trust in institutions, trust in governance and oversight, trust in technology and data practices, and trust built through lived, everyday interactions with digital systems.
These layers must be continuously tested, reinforced, and adapted as systems scale. One of the reflections emerging from that discussion, and one that deserves far greater attention, is the role of young people within these trust dynamics.
The role of young people as digital mediators in DPI systems
Young people are often framed in DPI debates as end-users, beneficiaries, or future stakeholders. Yet this framing overlooks a reality that plays out daily across families and communities. In practice, young people frequently act as the bridge between digital systems and broader society.
Whenever an adult or older person engages with a digital system, whether to complete an online payment, register for a service, or set up a new digital ID, that interaction is often mediated by a younger person who provides reassurance and guidance. I’ve seen this dynamic unfold countless times at home. Teaching my grandparents how to verify a payment or reset a password on their phones takes patience, care, and repetition. And more than that, it takes trust. They trust me before they trust the system. And through that relationship, the system becomes a little more approachable, a little more credible.
These informal acts of support rarely appear in policy frameworks or official DPI strategies, yet they play an outsized role in shaping legitimacy. In contexts where fear, misinformation, or exclusion undermine confidence in public digital systems, the reassurance provided by a trusted young person can make the difference between uptake and rejection.
This reveals an important governance insight: young people can actively mediate DPI’s social legitimacy. As early adopters, digital translators, and community connectors, they function as trust-builders across generations. When they understand how systems work, feel confident questioning them, and see their concerns reflected in design and governance choices, trust spreads organically through households, peer networks, and communities. When they feel excluded or skeptical, distrust can propagate just as quickly.
Challenges in DPI implementation: bridging the social legitimacy gap
DPI is increasingly the backbone through which people access public services, exercise rights, and participate in economic and social life. As DPI systems scale nationally and, in some cases, across borders, the gap between technical functionality and social legitimacy becomes more consequential.
Top-down awareness campaigns and formal user training have their place, but they often fail to reach the spaces where trust is actually negotiated: kitchens, community centers, schools, and networks of friends and communities. This is precisely where young people operate. Ignoring their role risks building technically sound systems that struggle to gain meaningful adoption or that reproduce existing patterns of exclusion.
Recognizing youth as trust-builders also shifts how consultations should be designed. Rather than viewing engagement as a one-off exercise or a box-ticking activity, there is a need to open sustained spaces for youth participation and to leverage youth-centered data and engagement methodologies that meet young people where they are.
Pathways for meaningful youth inclusion
At the Datasphere Initiative, we have seen that meaningful inclusion flourishes when young people are given opportunities to experiment with data-driven systems, through labs, workshops, or even sandbox environments. These spaces act as living classrooms where youth can question assumptions, test ideas, and surface trust concerns long before systems are deployed.
Sandboxes are one example of how this can take shape. By providing protected environments for experimentation, they can test both technical performance and social trust assumptions. Projects like the COR Sandbox, which explores online redress mechanisms for children and involves them as core stakeholders, demonstrate how inclusive approaches strengthen legitimacy and adoption. Yet sandboxes should be seen as part of a wider ecosystem of youth-led DPI experimentation, including labs, participatory consultations, and pilots that connect lived experience to system design and policy decisions.
As DPI continues to structure access to services, rights, and opportunities worldwide, youth cannot be treated as an afterthought. Recognizing young people as trust-builders and creating the conditions for them to engage meaningfully in co-design, testing, and governance is both about inclusion and effectiveness.
When youth are empowered as co-designers, experimenters, and mediators, they strengthen the very foundation on which digital public infrastructure depends: trust. My invitation is to imagine DPI ecosystems where youth participation is not symbolic, but hands-on, iterative, and embedded to build trust that lasts.At the Datasphere Initiative, we have developed a meaningful youth engagement methodology, and we would be glad to explore how it could be applied to support consultations, experimentation, and youth participation throughout the development and deployment of DPI. We invite partners interested in advancing this work to connect with us and help build the next generation of trusted and inclusive digital systems.
