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From mobile money in rural Kenya to digital identity systems that let people work anywhere in the world, new forms of ownership are quietly reshaping how prosperity is created and shared. As the global economy becomes increasingly driven by data, algorithms, and networks rather than physical assets, the question of who owns these foundations has never been more critical. Ïma Essien, MBA student at Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley shares why distributing ownership of intangible assets rather than merely redistributing income may be one of the defining economic challenges and opportunities of today’s multipolar world.
Ina remote village in Kenya, a grandmother sends money to her daughter in Nairobi with a few taps on a basic phone, paying fees to a system governed locally rather than by distant shareholders. In Estonia, a software developer working from Bangkok manages a European company through a state-backed digital identity, participating in wealth creation without physical residence. These are not isolated curiosities. They are early signals of a deeper shift in how modern prosperity is owned.
The global economy is increasingly driven not by factories or land, but by intangible assets: data, algorithms, intellectual property, and network effects. Yet ownership of these assets remains highly concentrated. Platforms extract value from billions of users, while the communities generating that value capture little of the upside. As global order becomes more multipolar, that ownership model is no longer inevitable.
Traditional responses to inequality, from welfare programs to proposals for universal basic income, remain rooted in industrial-era logic. They redistribute income after value has already been captured. But today’s wealth is created upstream, when user behavior trains algorithms, when local knowledge informs AI systems, and when digital infrastructure generates compounding network effects.
The question, then, is not only how to share income, but how to distribute ownership of the assets that produce it. Who owns the data generated by daily life? Who controls the algorithms that turn that data into value? And who benefits when intangible assets appreciate?
This shift matters because intangible ownership increasingly determines bargaining power, resilience, and long-term prosperity. Communities that organize to claim rights over their data and knowledge can capture value currently extracted by global platforms. Those that do not risk becoming digital tenants in an economy they collectively sustain.
Around the world, practical experiments are already underway. India’s digital public infrastructure reaches over a billion people through interoperable systems for identity, payments, and data consent, governed as public goods rather than proprietary platforms. Brazil’s instant payment system, PIX, now serves the vast majority of adults and supports trillions of dollars in annual transactions through open, low-cost rails. Across Africa, community-rootedmobile money systems have leap frogged traditional banking, embedding financial access into everyday life.
Beyond payments, new governance models are forming around data and knowledge itself. Platform cooperatives allow workers and creators to own the digital market places they depend on.
Indigenous data sovereignty frameworks protect traditional knowledge from extraction while enabling participation in research and innovation. Community-governed datasets for artificial intelligence are beginning to challenge the assumption that training data must be freely harvested and privately monetized.
What unites these efforts is not ideology, but design. Ownership is distributed at the level where value is generated, and governance is structured to ensure participation, accountability, and benefit-sharing.
This transition is not without risk. Without clear governance, data-sharing arrangements can entrench new asymmetries rather than dismantle old ones. Poorly designed systems can exclude those without formal identity or digital access. Jurisdictional fragmentation can enable regulatory arbitrage, allowing bad actors to exploit gaps while compliant businesses face rising complexity.
There is also a danger of digital feudalism: a future in which intangible assets are even more concentrated than industrial capital once was, controlled by a small number of firms or states through opaque algorithms and proprietary infrastructure. Avoiding that outcome requires intentional choices about standards, rights, and accountability.
For Global South nations, the window is narrowing to assert control over digital assets before new dependencies harden. The goal is not isolation, but leverage. Public digital infrastructure and community data rights can ensure that clinics contributing health data, farmers sharing crop information, and workers generating platform value see tangible returns in services, credit, and opportunity.
For advanced economies, continuing to treat data solely as private corporate property while inequality widens is politically fragile. Extending dividend-style logic to digital assets offers a way to share technological gains without undermining innovation, provided governance remains transparent and proportionate.
For the international system, the choice is structural. Either institutions evolve to support democratic ownership of intangible assets, or technological power concentrates further across a shrinking set of firms and jurisdictions. If prosperity is generated collectively, ownership frameworks must reflect that reality.
The multipolar world is often framed as a story of geopolitical rivalry. But it is also a moment of design choice. From Kenyan mobile money to Estonian digital identity to India’s public digital infrastructure, new ownership models are being tested in real time. They suggest that communities need not choose between innovation and equity, or between openness and sovereignty.
The future of prosperity will be shaped less by how fast technology advances than by who owns its foundations. Distributing ownership of intangible assets is no longer a radical proposition. It is a pragmatic response to how value is created today.
The question is not whether this transition will happen, but who will shape it. Communities, firms, and governments that act now can help write the rules of amore inclusive digital economy. Those that wait may find the next system of ownership already locked in.
Ïma Essien is part of the BGG Young Voices Cohort of 2025. She is an MBA candidate at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and General Partner at Courtyard Ventures, where she leads early-stageinvestments and fund operations. She has worked with the United Nations in South Africa, Google, and U.S. healthcare networks, and now advises leaders navigating transitions across global health, finance, and development. Her work spans Africa, Asia, LATAM, and the U.S., with a focus on women’s health, impact finance, and social innovation.
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