02 PRACTICE AREA
Digital Public Infrastructure: Strategy, Design & Safeguards
The rails of the digital economy deserve the best legal engineering.
OVERVIEW
Digital Public Infrastructure — digital identity, payments, and data exchange — is how nations come online as systems, not just as users. Done well, DPI unlocks inclusion, efficiency, and innovation. Done carelessly, it hard-codes exclusion and surveillance into national infrastructure.
LexInventum is one of the few African practices with hands-on experience across the full DPI stack: we have advised national ID authentication platforms, national revenue and e-invoicing infrastructure, and contributed globally to the safeguards frameworks that now guide DPI deployment worldwide.
WHAT WE DO
DPI Strategy & Legal Architecture
National and sectoral DPI strategy and roadmaps
Enabling legislation and subsidiary regulation for ID, payments, and data exchange
Institutional design: who owns, operates, governs, and oversees DPI
Federated and interoperable architectures — the legal layer
Digital ID & Authentication
Experience: legal advisory on the NIN Authentication Platform
Legal frameworks for foundational and functional ID
Authentication platform terms, liability, and grievance redress
Privacy-by-design and proportionality in identity systems
e-KYC & e-Payments
Experience: Nigerian Revenue Service Merchant Buyer Platform; Nigerian E-Invoicing Regulation
Tiered KYC frameworks and financial inclusion mandates
Payment infrastructure rules, participation agreements, and scheme governance
Interoperability mandates and switching arrangements
DPI Safeguards & Compliance
Experience: global contributor to Digital Public Infrastructure Safeguards
Rights-based safeguards: inclusion, privacy, accountability, and redress
Safeguards audits and gap assessments against global DPI safeguards frameworks
Data protection and sovereignty in shared infrastructure
Rights-based interoperability — ensuring data flows serve people, not just systems
DPI Procurement & Vendor Structures
Technology deployment structures: build-operate-transfer, PPPs, managed services
Open-source and digital public goods licensing in government
Vendor lock-in prevention and exit planning