Digital Kazakhstan: Digital Literacy & E-Government Access Programme

Kazakhstan's state programme Digital Kazakhstan was launched in 2018 by the Ministry of Digital Development, Innovation and Aerospace Industry to raise digital literacy nationwide, expand e-government through the eGov.kz portal and the 'Government for Citizens' Public Service Centres, and extend broadband and mobile coverage to rural regions, running through 2022.

The programme's stated aims were nationwide digital-literacy uplift, e-government expansion, and extending mobile/broadband coverage to rural areas.

Training was delivered through multiple channels, including school information systems for parents, healthcare digital-literacy training for patients, and employment/e-labour centres, alongside a national basic digital-skills training push and expansion of mobile broadband infrastructure to rural settlements.

Documented results include over 1.6 million parents trained on school information systems; 5,093,257 patients (28.2% of the attached population) who received healthcare digital-literacy training; 535,695 people trained through employment/e-labour centres; and 686,000 people trained in basic digital skills against a 500,000 target, all within the first roughly 12 months (2018), per the Prime Minister's office. Mobile broadband reached 5,332 settlements (99.3% of the population) by the end of 2020. Kazakhstan's UN E-Government Development Index rank rose from 39th (2018, score 0.7597) to 29th (2020, score 0.8375) and then 28th (2022), a rise the UN report explicitly credited to the programme.

Kazakhstan's Higher Audit Chamber found 1.1 billion tenge in outright financial violations, 2.2 billion tenge in ineffective budget planning, and 46.5 billion tenge in 'inexpedient' spending across Digital Kazakhstan-linked projects; 3 of 5 state-funded tech centres (4.9 billion tenge) produced no results, and 32 of 95 funded startups had already folded. By August 2022, 1,673 villages (roughly 266,400 people) still lacked mobile broadband despite official household internet-access figures above 96%, Freedom House's Freedom on the Net 2023 report noted persistent rural complaints about connection quality, and a peer-reviewed study found rural students had markedly lower digital access than urban peers during remote learning.