Between late 2020 and March 2023 I worked as a consultant to the International Trade Centre on the Ready4Trade Central Asia programme — first as the lead researcher producing country-level e-commerce market diagnostics for Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, then as a national coach training Kyrgyz SMEs on e-commerce strategy, then as the regional marketplaces expert preparing and delivering a forty-two-slide briefing to more than a hundred participants from across the four Central Asian countries, and finally as the moderator of the Central Asia e-commerce ecosystem panel at the Ready4Trade conference in Dubai.
This is the index post for the eight-post witness-voice series that traces that arc end-to-end. Read the posts in order, or in the cluster that matches your interest.
Part one — diagnosis (2020–2021)
The three country reports plus the Kyrgyz handicrafts specialised brief. Each one is the witness-voice retrospective of an ITC deliverable I signed off in early 2021.
- What Kyrgyzstan could sell online in 2021 — the main KG country report. Six hundred and sixty-two Etsy listings for the keyword Kyrgyzstan, all sold by merchants outside the country. A four-million-dollar New York company built on Kyrgyz felt. What was found, sector by sector.
- Salt, mare’s milk, and Kaspi.kz — the Kazakhstan country report. A seven-hundred-billion-tenge e-commerce market, a single domestic super-app worth six and a half billion dollars on a London IPO, and a set of food-and-beverage SMEs whose products did not match what online buyers were actually searching for.
- Seven thousand Etsy shops based in Uzbekistan — the Uzbekistan country report. Twenty thousand Etsy listings for uzbekistan, seven thousand of them held by shops physically inside Uzbekistan. A government-led textile-cluster strategy aimed at moving a $1.6-billion export sector to $7 billion by 2025.
- The Kyrgyz handicrafts e-commerce report — the specialised sub-sector deliverable. Women artisans, contemporary design, and the storefront question. The producers and the storefronts were in different countries.
Part two — capacity (2021–2022)
The Ready4Trade national coach programme moved the research findings into structured workshops with named SME beneficiaries.
- The Ready4Trade Module 1 workbook — how the curriculum used Tumar Art Group as the running case to teach Central Asian SMEs e-commerce strategy. Four sessions, forty practical exercises.
- Five Kyrgyz companies, one Module 1 — what the coach programme actually did inside Kyrgyzstan. Aziar Textile, Selina Style, Tumar, Pasadena Moda, OSKO — five named SMEs walked through market research and strategy by the end of March 2021.
Part three — action (May 2022)
The May 2022 consultant contract produced a regional briefing and four follow-on webinars for more than a hundred participants from across Central Asia.
- US and EU e-commerce platforms for Central Asian merchants — the forty-two-slide regional briefing. Amazon, Walmart, Etsy, eBay, Zalando, Foursource, Fibre2Fashion, and ecomConnect. What the session gave the hundred-plus participants, and what the follow-on case-study webinars built on top of it.
Part four — convening (March 2023)
The Dubai conference made the regional ecosystem visible to itself.
- Moderating the Central Asia e-commerce ecosystem panel in Dubai — Ready4Trade Dubai, March 2023. Five panelists from four countries, seventy-five minutes, three questions. Notes from the chair.
How to read this
Read the four sections in order if you want the full arc: diagnosis → capacity → action → convening. Read the country reports if your interest is in market access for a specific Central Asian state. Read the capacity-and-action posts if your interest is in how donor-funded SME programmes get from research to operational impact. Read the Dubai post if your interest is in regional ecosystem convening.
The whole series sits between two existing posts on kglabs.org. The USAID IT 2019 e-commerce diagnostic is the pre-ITC baseline. The PEAK e-commerce accelerator witness post is the parallel domestic operational delivery channel that ran during the ITC engagement. Together those ten posts cover the 2019–2023 arc of e-commerce capacity work in Central Asia, from the inside.
— Aziz Soltobaev, KG Labs Public Foundation, May 2026.