On 22 May 2019, a roundtable in Bishkek brought together representatives of the Office of the President, the Ministry of Economy, the State Tax Service, the National Bank of the Kyrgyz Republic, Kyrgyz Pochtasy, the International Business Council, and the business community to discuss the state of e-commerce in Kyrgyzstan and the draft law being prepared to regulate it.
The session was convened by the Governance in Action — Support to Jogorku Kenesh programme, implemented by Palladium and funded by the United Kingdom. Kalybek Imashev, the programme’s manager, opened the discussion on what was holding the sector back. Dastan Imanaliev, head of the legal sector at the International Business Council, spoke from the business-association side. Aziz Soltobaev, founder of the KG Labs public foundation, presented on how other countries had handled e-commerce regulation and what the prospects looked like in Kyrgyzstan.
The picture the panel laid out was specific. Around two million bank cards were in circulation in 2017 according to the National Bank, and roughly ninety-five percent of card operations were cash withdrawals. Bank cards were blocked from online payments by default, with customers required to visit a branch in person to enable the function. The country had no formal e-commerce legal framework — the draft law «On e-commerce,» prepared by the Ministry of Economy with support from the GIZ Central Asian Regional Trade Promotion Programme, had only just been posted on the ministry’s website for public comment.
The roundtable closed with the announcement of an interdepartmental working group to take the regulatory impact analysis forward, and a strategy and action plan for e-commerce development was named as the next deliverable.
Source: International Business Council, 23 May 2019. ibc.kg/en/news/ibc/4379_ecommerce_development_discussed_in_bishkek