Building Bridges: Aligning Digital Public Infrastructure and Cross-Border Data Flows

The movement of data across country borders is essential to the global economy, enabling the transmission of information for online communication, tracking global supply chains, achieving sustainable development, ensuring global health security, addressing climate change, sharing research, and supporting technological innovation. Fundamentally, data flows underpin both Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and Data Free Flow with Trust (DFFT). This Policy Brief explores areas of synergy to affordable, accessible, and interoperable DPI through the lens of cross-border data flows, highlighting sectors such as sustainable agriculture and public health, and outlines how data flows can accelerate and enhance the G20 DPI agenda. From a policy standpoint, both DPI and data flows enable local data ecosystem maturation, particularly in data protection, and have received support at the highest levels in the G7 and G20. From the local to the global, this Brief argues that efforts to elevate and operationalise DPI at scale and data flows globally should not take place in parallel but rather, reinforce and, to the extent possible, complement one another.