Building proactive data-driven digital government in Kazakhstan

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Earlier this year, off the back of Kazakhstan hosting the regional forum of the UN-backed GovStack programme, this writer wrote about Kazakhstan’s moment in the Digital Government sun, taking digital services leadership in Central Asia through partnerships, proactive service development, and the creation of a national large language model (LLM) and a supercomputer.

In an interview with GovInsider, Kazakhstan’s then Vice Minister of Digital Development, Innovation and Aerospace Industry, Askar Zhambakin, refers to both this regional forum and an upcoming UN ESCAP conference as Kazakhstan’s chance to “put [them]selves on the technological map”.

The question of regional leadership is linked to Kazakhstan’s emphasis on the digital economy over the past couple of years. Earlier this year, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev set the government the goal of doubling IT exports from US$500 million (S$672 million) to US$1 billion (S$1,34 billion) by 2026, terming it a “strategically important task” that would be spearheaded by the country’s digital development ministry.

Part of the Ministry of Digital Development’s response to this goal has been to attract startups from across Central Asia to Astana and Almaty (Kazakhstan’s two largest cities), introducing tax exemptions for tech startups and allowing them to be registered in Kazakhstan extraterritorially through the Astana Hub.

Another key component has been digital government, with the country currently positioned 28th on the UN e-Government Development Index (including 8th in “online services”). It has developed more than 1,000 digital services.

Kazakhstan’s digital government website talks about the “fourth stage” of digital government, which it calls “transformational”. In practice, Zhambakin says this means an institutional framework for government-wide digital transformation, business process redesign, integrating 95 government databases into one data lake, and providing proactive digital services.

Proactive services and digital family card

Kazakhstan has already started to see a great deal of success, developing more than 40 proactive services to-date. One of the most successful of these is the Digital Family card, which earlier this year won a digital service prize at the World Government Summit.

Zhambakin describes the service as a “multidimensional poverty model”, developed by a collection of government ministries together with the support of the UNDP. The model works by gathering depersonalised data on more than 100 parameters from 40 different state databases. This data is used to categorise families into five different groups (ranked A to E).

Those categorised in the most at-risk group – about three per cent of the population or 195,000 families – are then proactively contacted by and offered government support like social payments.

As well as enabling government-to-citizen services, “social policy can be adjusted based on the data we have”, Zhambakin says, as a reminder that digital government services are not necessarily unidimensional. The ultimate goal, he says, is to enable data-driven policy making.

Embracing life-events model

As with countries like Singapore and Ireland, the concept of proactive government services is closely tied up with “life events” in Kazakhstan, with services engineered through the prism of key actions in a person’s life, like starting a school or getting married.

To this end, Kazakhstan has made substantial progress in digitizing government services. Zhambakin gives the example of buying a property. “When you buy a property”, he says, “it can be registered very quickly: you go to the notary office, sign a contract with the buyer, verify you are in a valid state to sign the document and put it into the system”.

What is less straightforward is the myriads of services that exist around the property purchase – buying the relevant licenses, or changing electricity provider, for example. A life events approach would associate the two, reaching out proactively to citizens to support them in these decisions.

Kazakhstan’s life events approach has been front and centre of their digital government strategy since December 2017, when they launched a proactive service for childbirth, combining the birth registration of a child with placing them on the queue for kindergarten and assigning them birth and childcare alliances – with citizens able to access the services via SMS or through the eGov mobile app.

This service has reduced the collective process time by a full working day, cutting time spent travelling to different agencies, submitting applications and waiting in queues.

Joining up digital government

If a life events approach provides the philosophy behind digital government, there is an associated technical component that underpins its operation. Last year, says Zhambakin, Kazakhstan introduced the concept of a digital government platform-as-a-service, with a digital tech stack, government cloud, and APIs to connect government services to those of banks and other private sector actors.

In conjunction with a consolidated data lake, which allows government services to draw on data from multiple ministries, this integrated infrastructure drastically reduces the administrative burden of bureaucracy.

Here, Zhambakin gives the example of risk management as it relates to air pollution monitoring. In Kazakhstan, fossil fuel companies are obliged to include sensors to monitor air pollution levels at key points along their supply chain: namely extraction; transportation; refinery; and at petrol stations. These sensors provide a live feed of pollution levels to a central government system, reducing the need for companies to file reports, and allowing the government to proactively monitor any failing air filters or non-compliant companies.

The use of digital stacks across government means that similar technologies can be applied in a variety of different situations. Elsewhere, the Ministry of Ecology, Geology and Natural resources has been working with the UNDP to tag snow leopards using satellite telemetry. Each leopard is fitted with a collar that, like the sensors in oil and gas supply chains, send information about the animals’ movements to specialists, giving them a new level of proactivity in their conservation efforts.

Looking ahead

Talking about his priorities for the coming months and years, Zhambakin foresees replicating the success of these efforts in the Oil & Gas industry in Kazakhstan’s other large industry sectors like metallurgy, healthcare and agriculture; as well as continuing to build awareness about existing programmes and services.

The country’s presence on the international digital government roadmap will continue to grow. After the GovStack conference, along with several high-profile side events at UN events in New York, Astana is set to host a ministerial conference of UN ESCAP, where the focus will be on the potential opening of a digital solutions centre in Kazakhstan next year.

Zhambakin’s highest priority is to replicate, for businesses, the type of services that has been provided to citizens. For the most part on the global stage, the next step in bundled digital services for businesses is up for grabs. It remains to be seen what the business equivalent of life events will be. But, with Kazakhstan looking to climb further up the UN ranking list, it would be unwise to bet against Kazakhstan finding that breakthrough.