Nikolai Olukhovoy/Creative Commons
In a region known more for its natural resources than its digital capabilities, Kazakhstan's leadership has ripples across Central Asia, writes Luke Kavanaugh
Last October, Kazakhstan's international organizations and digital development agencies signed a letter of intent to cooperate in driving inclusive digital transformation, strengthening innovation and ensuring knowledge exchange across Central Asia.
As expected, the agreement was hailed as the ushering in of Kazakhstan's digital age, with Arken Aristanov, head of the country's Agency for International Development, calling it confirmation of the belief that “Kazakhstan can act as a regional catalyst.” 'Using government digital solutions to drive change', we are leveraging the country's expertise and experience to facilitate peer-to-peer learning across the continent.
Six months on, Kazakhstan's capital Astana hosts the GovStack regional conference co-hosted with the United Nations International Telecommunications Union (ITU), and thanks to another UN agency, a less formal but yet more important statement of intent. has been announced. . Kazakhstan will share high-level best practices, trends, opportunities and challenges by acting as a champion of GovStack, a United Nations effort to establish a global toolkit for the digitalization of public sector infrastructure We were able to set the agenda for a two-day regional forum. Level sessions and working groups between key figures in the digital space of Central Asia.
For many, this marks Kazakhstan's arrival on the international stage, a country better known for its oil and metal exports than necessarily its digital exports. But behind the scenes, it represents the culmination of years of sustained focus on digital government that has helped the country quietly grow to 28 countries.th Highest in the world in the United Nations e-Government Development Index (compared with neighboring countries Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan: 69)th and 81cent each), developing over 1,000 digital services in the process.
The digital economy was once again at the center of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev's State of the Nation Address this year, with the government setting a goal of doubling IT exports from US$500 million to US$1 billion by 2026. In an IT-centric knowledge-based economy, he declared digital transformation a “strategic priority” and laid the foundation for strategic partnerships and cooperation with foreign IT companies.
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Realizing Kazakhstan’s digital government ambitions
In many ways, 2024 will be Kazakhstan's moment in the light of digital government. However, the transformation is by no means a new phenomenon, it has already been happening for more than a decade. Since 2017, the country has been providing proactive administrative services centered on “life events.” Many governments are now focusing on developing services around milestone events such as the birth of a child or retirement, and Kazakhstan is among the international leaders in this field, including Singapore and Ireland.
For example, in December 2017, the Astana government launched active childcare services. This allows parents to digitally register the birth of their child, after which they are automatically queued for kindergarten and allocated maternity and child welfare allowances as appropriate. Updates for these services will be sent automatically via text message and, starting in September 2018, on Telegram.
Elsewhere, the country's eGov website talks about entering the “fourth stage of e-government”, calling it “transformative”. “The main objective now is to deliver services with maximum efficiency,” which means turning these 1,000-plus services into seamless and active engagement with the public. The latest services added to the country's eGov mobile app range from everything from applying for flood assistance to restricting access to gambling websites.
All of this brings the usual benefits to citizens of powerful digital government services: accountability, trust, and simplified engagement between citizens and government. But as the country enters the “fourth stage” of digital government, it also appears that the latest and most ambitious projects will involve the private sector and feed into society-wide innovation efforts at a broader level. Masu.
Read more articles by Luke Cavanaugh: How Romania is leveraging digital government to connect with diaspora communities
Two major projects will lead the way: developing a national large-scale language model (LLM) and creating a supercomputer. Last December, Kazakhstan's Til Kazina National Science Center announced efforts to adapt the LLM to the Kazakh language and made the results available to government agencies and industry stakeholders through open source code. This model could enable use cases such as chatbots, internal knowledge sharing, and advanced analytics, similar to countries such as Estonia, Singapore, and the Netherlands. This will not only directly promote Kazakhstan's digital government, but also revitalize the country's entire technology sector in collaboration with regional IT hubs, government-backed incubators and investment companies.
Most recently, the government announced the development of a supercomputer, which is primarily intended to integrate with existing e-government infrastructure and enhance Kazakhstan's international digital reputation. It is hoped that the supercomputer will “establish Kazakhstan as a regional leader in Central Asia in the advancement of AI and provide an opportunity to lend computing power to neighboring countries.” Kazakhstan's exports for this purpose are already beginning to benefit neighboring countries. Stroke platform Cerebra, which provides automated stroke diagnosis at an accelerated pace, recently entered the Uzbek market after incubation and testing in Kazakhstan.
What Kazakhstan's leadership means for the region
But Kazakhstan's new push for digital government is likely to benefit Central Asia far beyond the isolated companies entering the market. The past year has also seen increased cooperation at bilateral and multilateral levels, as well as proxies from increased investment from non-regional actors.
At the bilateral level, Kazakhstan last year signed an agreement with its Central Asian neighbor Tajikistan, under which it undertakes to export the first elements of e-government. Some of the solutions to be transferred include “Smart Bridge,” a platform that simplifies collaboration between government and private sector information systems, and “Smart Data Ukimet,” a data analysis platform. And it is not only Tajikistan that has signed these agreements with Astana; Azerbaijan, for example, is also considering doing the same.
Given the regional tensions in Central Asia, cooperation at the multilateral level becomes somewhat complicated. However, a common history, a common language (albeit spoken less and less frequently), and in some countries lower trade tariffs and economic unions lay a solid foundation for potential cooperation. It's here. Cooperation with the Government of Kazakhstan and ITU through the GovStack project may be in place to realize this opportunity.
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In addition to the regional forums it has hosted, the Government of Kazakhstan is cooperating with ITU to host technical workshops to accelerate international technical standards, identify open source software and contribute to the initiative, and help countries develop the GovStack specification. We are committed to helping you implement it. Elsewhere, Kazakhstan has also been appointed as UNICEF's pathfinder in the region, driving the digital public goods agenda and validating identified products.
Advances in open source digital public goods (DPGs) may represent the greatest opportunity for the rest of Central Asia. By adopting open source, low-code, and no-code solutions, countries like Tajikistan can dramatically improve their digital government capabilities. In 2021, Accessible Kazakhstan (an app that allows people with mobility disabilities to plan their own accessible routes and check how accessible and safe a place is) was recognized as the first of his DPGs in Central Asia. I did. If Cerebra's example is any guide, we'll see companies like Accessible Kazakhstan create ripples not just within the country, but across the region.
Kazakhstan is gearing up for a supercomputer project, a “fourth phase” of transformation, and a “strategically important mission,” but the impact of these projects is far from certain. However, the attention the GovStack summit and its surroundings, and the discussions and partnerships formed there both bilaterally and in working groups, marked a turning point for digital government in Central Asia, and the title digital government leader was not as it should have been. It may be a demonstration that there is no such thing. Limited to Europe and Southeast Asia.
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