Digital Kazakhstan: 90% of public services to be provided in electronic mode

“Under the support of the Head of State the Digital Kazakh Programme was passed, which is being implemented in the 5 directions. This helped to define the Programme’s specific objectives. Thanks to the work done the GDP will grow up to 30% starting 2025, 300 thousand new jobs will be created. 67 billion tenge is directed to the digital ecosystem, 97% of the population will be provided with broadband internet,” says Askar Zhumagaliyev, Kazakh minister of digital development, innovations and aerospace industry.

These plans are based on the world benchmark, says the minister. In Europe, digitalization results in a 40% growth in economy.

He went on to say that there are certain achievements in terms of the development of human capital.

“All the schools across the country are equipped with computers, while 90% of the schools are connected to broadband internet. As for higher education, around 19 thousand grants in information and communication technologies were issued for the 2019-2020 academic year,” he said.

Courses on digital literacy are conducted on a regular basis, which focuses on increasing the population’s literacy level.

The Digital Silk Road direction centers on provision of quality internet.

“As of today 117 cities and 3 324 villages with a population of over 250 persons are covered with broadband internet. Over the last two years 481 villages were connected to broadband internet,” he said.

5G pilot projects were carried out in Nur-Sultan, Almaty and Zhymkent. In 2020 880 villages are due to be connected to broadband internet.

The act on public services enabled to provide 80% of all services in electronic mode, due to automatization the paper workflow was reduced by 700 million documents. In the meanwhile, the time for providing public services fell by 3 times on average. This year it is planned to increase the provision of public services in electronic mode to 90%.

The digitalization process seems to be effective in other spheres such as health care, finance, social and labour area. Thus digitalization enabled to save 50% of their time, as for the financing sector the amount of non-cash payments amounted to 14.5 trillion tenge.

“Elbasy and the Head of State attach special attention to digitalization. During the expanded meeting the Head of State underscored the significance of the work in the digitalization area and directed to push forward in order to achieve the outcome,” said the Kazakh PM.

Kazakh PM Askar Mamin tasked the Digital Development Ministry with the Education Ministry to upgrade work to qualitatively train specialists in the IT sector using the best international practices.

Author: Adlet Seilkhanov

Image credit: primeminister.kz