Kyrgyzstan Development Gateway: From a single site to a national web portal

Author : Ainura Djoroeva
Date added : 2002-04-15

Brief Project Background

Not too much time ago the question of IT impact on country development was considered in the narrow circle of IT specialists and some experienced policy makers who used the Internet and had clear vision of all its benefits. Many skeptics criticized possibilities of the Internet, they used to say about Web in such terms as: “useless and expensive toy”, “dream of crazy persons”, etc. Others argued that Kyrgyzstan had not any chance to achieve the level of IT development of “civilized countries”.

By good fortune I had entered the team of those who believed that the Internet was the bridge to connect Kyrgyzstan with the rest of the world and the mechanism to make our start-up possibilities equal with the CIS''s richer countries. At that moment Kyrgyzstan''s Internet users were a small community (about a hundred); in the cyberspace our republic was represented by a dozen of personal pages, containing controversial information. To rectify the situation the State Committee on Foreign Investment has decided to create an official website of Kyrgyzstan that would contain information about government, economy, culture and, first of all, investment opportunities.

Reality has shown all benefits offered by the Internet. During the last years having a website or at least a web page has become a part of the image of every self-respecting agency. The number of governmental, non-governmental and business web-sites has increased in arithmetic progression. Today the number of such web-resources achieved one and half thousand. For that moment there was a strong necessity to create a portal to integrate and systemize such huge volume of information.

This portal - Kyrgyzstan Development Gateway has been created as part of Development Gateway Project, initiated by the World Bank. My experience in implementation of this project is more than two years.

Now, analyzing the progress, I understand that the idea of our project was strategically right; moreover our project has made real contribution to the stabilization and development of Kyrgyzstan. The project has become a creative tool, a self-evolving system that now unites different vigorous forces of the society and is changing the environment and the people. Moreover this is a dynamic system, i.e. it adjusts itself to requirements and opportunities changes of the Kyrgyz society.

Just an example, in 2000, the National ICT Development Strategy was designed and adopted with our actively support. In 2001, our joint efforts with the Presidential Administration resulted in the creation of www.gov.kg state service portal based on software created by KDG team. I’d like to note that the software satisfies world high-quality standards. The portal is the first step towards e-government in Kyrgyzstan.

In 2000, our key project partners - leading NGOs and businesses - established E-Development Foundation, and in 2001, the Foundation received an InfoDev grant for the planning phase implementation. The project challenge was to facilitate comprehensive and sustainable development of Kyrgyzstan on local and global levels through providing online access to high-quality information, communication and transaction toolkits and designing offline solutions for local stakeholders in the field of e-development. The planning phase objectives were to conduct E-readiness and Needs Assessment researches; to prepare business plan for further project development; to build broad-scale partnership with the agencies representing public and private sectors; but the key objective was to create the country portal. Portal is the key project component, which can be envisioned as self-evolving mechanism for creating, integrating, exchanging and disseminating knowledge.

KgDG portal was launched in July 2001 and currently acts as ASP (unrivalled on local market) offering decentralized and distributed site development and hosting.

Approach chosen by the Foundation team for Portal development fully matches the ideology of the Development Gateway Foundation, since the project acts as facilitator and integrator of local ICT for development actors. Stakeholders are provided with access to content management tools, while project team primary responsibility is technological upgrade, trouble-shooting, editorial supervision, and feedback maintenance.

Portal is currently one of the most popular local information resources with some 300 unique visitors per day (2% of daily audience of all Kyrgyz sites) and 35 content-partners regularly uploading new content.)

Results

During the planning phase, the best programmers of our team have designed Kyrgyzstan's unique software built on the following technological principles:

- Cross-platform and cross-browser compatibility;
- Architecture flexibility and scalability - KgDG solution allows changing easily the existing structure of portal, introducing new modules of the portal, providing additional features and functionality, linking up external databases to the portal;
- KgDG has centralized software and hardware platform with distributed content management. It is not only content coordinator, but also unlimited number of content-partners who upload documents. Each content partner is vested with right to develop only his own thematic section of portal, but at the same time he may further entrust rights to own content partners to develop subsection of his section;
- Customization - KgDG portal offers customization with regard to content, appearance and language. Customization will utilize various design templates based on user preferences. The templates can be based on different page layouts as well as on different types of information delivered to the user.

The project has envisaged a range of activities: Kyrgyzstan's Internet space has been researched and monitored; workshops and roundtables involving representatives of all society sectors have been arranged in different regions of the country. The workshops and roundtables were aimed at facilitating ICT development and effectiveness in Kyrgyzstan. The Project activities have been fully covered in the mass-media thus making it possible to create feedback with those who insufficiently use or are only going to use the Internet.

To my mind, the Project's very important effect is the aspiration of many agencies to collaborate with us. This fact has been confirmed by dozens of cooperation memos and agreements.

Lessons

Firstly, we have learned that success of the KDG Project is depending on complex partnership mechanisms. The great number of partners is not a guaranty of project sustainable development. Therefore it is necessary to create a matrix-based partnership network that would use each partner's most effective resource. By this rather exacting tactics of interacting with the partners we would improve image of the project as a sound and sustainable partner.

Secondly, we have learned that in most cases our would-be partners are unaware about the portal effective use. Hence the next project stage requires the creation of a consulting structure that would involve the most competent project partners.

Thirdly, we have learned that making the project successful needs new ways. One of them is the national competition within the framework of the KDG Project. The competition would have some 10 nominations: student project; public project; commercial project; personal pages, etc. Funds for this competition have been raised through the project volunteers and partners.

Development Impacts

Today the usage of ICT in Kyrgyzstan is entering new quality level. Whereas several years ago many of public functionaries were unaware about and unwilling to use the Internet now they seem to be the most active Internet promoters.

E.g., by request of the Consultative Council of Foreign Investment we have designed and are creating the portal concerning the Kyrgyzstan investment opportunities; in the future its services will allow the would-be investors to easily use different databases and effect document circulation with public and business structures.

The design of the Business portal for the Kyrgyzstan Chamber of Commerce and Industry (our main partner in this area) is just started. A portal for the Kyrgyz NGOs is being developed in cooperation with Public Policy Center and an e-learning portal in cooperation with the leading Kyrgyzstan universities.

Another vivid example of development aspects is as follows: two years ago I published an article 'Is e-commerce possible in Kyrgyzstan?' - today the National Bank has adopted the 5-year-long e-payment systems development program.

I'm sure that the Internet development had helped our country to make a big step towards the future, where will broader knowledge, cooperation and mutual understand, the lowest level of poverty. The success of our project is the symbol of positive changes in our society: people want to learn new things; to obtain new knowledge; to cooperate and exchange ideas. We - all the Development Gateway members, partners and friends - help them to realize it.

Project Information

Organisation : E-Development Foundation
URL : http;//www.gateway.kg
Total budget in US$ : 50 000

Are there any partners involved : yes
What is partners role?: content, technology, strategy and project development

Contact Information

Ainura Djoroeva
adjoroeva@gateway.kg
57, Kalyk-Akieva str., apt.42
Bishkek 720000
Kyrgyz Republic (Kyrgyzstan)

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