Osh ICT Development Roadmap 2019–2024: A Five-Year Plan for Kyrgyzstan’s Most Populous Region

On November 6, 2019, the Osh ICT Development Roadmap 2019–2024 was published. The report was researched and written by Aziz Soltobaev, engaged as an individual consultant through GIZ’s competitive tender process — commissioned because of his work at KG Labs building Kyrgyzstan’s startup ecosystem and his first-hand knowledge of the country’s ICT infrastructure. He was joined in the field by Alexandra Ishchenko. The project was funded by GIZ’s Sustainable Economic Growth programme and is the first systematic attempt to map what is actually working — and what specifically isn’t — in the technology sector of Kyrgyzstan’s most populous region. It pairs a current-situation analysis built from interviews, focus groups, and infrastructure data with a thirteen-direction roadmap meant to guide municipal, oblast-level, and donor decisions through 2024.

The frame the report adopts is direct. Osh’s ICT sector trails Bishkek’s, but it is meaningfully ahead of every other region of Kyrgyzstan. The bottleneck is not access to the internet — that has been largely solved over the past five years — and it is not the absence of trained people. It is that the public and private sectors in the region do not yet have working models for what ICT does inside their organisations, even when the connectivity and the technical specialists are available. People who train in Osh as IT specialists graduate into a region with too little demand for their skills and migrate to Bishkek or abroad. The report’s most striking single data point: the entire Osh oblast was being served, at the time of research, by two specialists in 1C accounting software. Bishkek had over a hundred.

The Infrastructure Story: Catching Up After 2014

For most of the 2000s, the digital divide between Bishkek and Osh was a physical-infrastructure problem. Kyrgyzstan is a mountainous country — over 90% of its territory is highland — and the 970-kilometre fibre route from Bishkek to Osh was an expensive piece of telecommunications construction that did not look commercially viable until the price of optical fibre dropped sufficiently in the early 2010s. Kyrgyztelecom and Elcat completed and launched the backbone in 2014. Until then, Osh had been served by digital radio-relay stations whose throughput was a small fraction of what the fibre line eventually delivered.

By Q3 2018, the oblast had 1,861.08 kilometres of fibre-optic line in operation. Four backbone ISPs — Kyrgyztelecom, Elcat, Megacom, and Aknet — provided the regional connectivity. Last-mile providers in Osh city included Kyrgyztelecom, Aknet, Unilink, Homeline, Ipswich, and Neotelecom; in Uzgen and Karasuu, ADSL service from Jet and Kyrgyztelecom and Wi-MAX from Maxlink covered most of the demand. In September 2019, a new provider, Nookat-Internet, launched in partnership with Skynet to extend coverage into the Nookat district. The pattern across the oblast was that the trunk infrastructure had largely arrived; what remained was the patchwork of local distribution into smaller towns and rural areas.

The internet exchange point story tells the second half of the connectivity divide. Bishkek has had a working IXP since 2003, enabling local peering between ISPs at speeds of up to 100 Mbps — which meant that from the early 2000s, traffic between Bishkek internet providers was exchanged locally rather than routing through international links. That local peering infrastructure was one of the structural factors behind the burst of technology startups in Bishkek in the early 2000s: fast, cheap connectivity between companies and their users gave early digital businesses a foundation that simply did not exist in the south. Osh had no IXP until 2019. Up to that point, a message sent between two Osh-based ISP customers physically routed through Bishkek and back — a 1,940-kilometre round trip for a piece of data that needed to travel a few hundred metres. The launch of an IXP in Osh in 2019 was one of the report’s headline structural recommendations becoming reality during the research period itself.

Tariffs: The Geographic Premium and Its Removal

Internet pricing carried a significant geographic premium for Osh users. At the point of greatest disparity, the cost per Mbps per month in Osh stood at around 1,150 soms — while the same bandwidth in Bishkek was available for 160–200 soms, roughly five to seven times cheaper. Both cities were served off the same national backbone; the gap was not a function of international wholesale costs. It was a structural consequence of Bishkek’s competitive ISP market and its local IXP, which allowed providers to exchange traffic cheaply and pass the savings on, while Osh providers without a local exchange point faced higher costs routing all traffic through the capital.

Metric	Bishkek	Osh (pre-2019)	Osh (2019)
Internet cost per Mbps/month	160–200 KGS	1,150–1,300 KGS	160–200 KGS
Internet Exchange Point (IXP)	Since 2003	None	Launched 2019
Local peering speed	Up to 100 Mbps between peers	N/A — all traffic via Bishkek	Available from 2019
Tariff parity with Bishkek	—	Not achieved	Achieved February 2019

By February 2019, that gap had been largely closed. Homeline introduced single republic-wide tariffs in January 2019, effectively ending geographic pricing discrimination for its subscribers — the structural shift the Roadmap identifies as the single most consequential positive event in regional ICT development in the period under review.

Mobile connectivity is one of the strongest cards Osh actually holds. Kyrgyzstan ranks among the cheapest countries globally for mobile data; Cable.co’s analysis put it in the world’s top three at $0.27 per GB. The Roadmap’s own measurements were less optimistic — averaging $0.80–0.90 per GB across the survey period, which still places Kyrgyzstan around 9th–10th globally. Megacom and Nurtelecom were offering unlimited 4G plans at 790 and 800 soms per month respectively as of August 2019. The PC penetration numbers complete the picture: 11,464 personal computers in use across enterprises and organisations in Osh oblast and 15,168 in Osh city as of 2017, against a national total of about 190,300 (2017) rising to a preliminary 203,315 by 2018.

The Cross-Border Position

Geographically, Osh oblast sits at one of the most important ICT-infrastructure crossroads in landlocked Central Asia. The region has multiple cross-border connections — to China at the Irkeshtam pass, two crossings to Uzbekistan at Dostuk, and several to Tajikistan. With sufficient infrastructure investment, the report argues, Osh could become a strategic route for international fibre-optic networks linking the Middle East and China to Russia and India, and could host a regional data centre offering cloud services, big-data analytics, and computational modelling for the wider Fergana Valley. The aspirational thirteenth roadmap direction — «become a regional Fergana Valley ICT hub» — is built on this geographic position. Whether the political and commercial conditions across the four-country border zone allow it to be realised is a question the report acknowledges but does not pretend to answer.

The Twelve Operational Directions

The roadmap proper sits in the second half of the report. It is structured as twelve operational directions, each with concrete actions and indicators, plus the thirteenth aspirational regional positioning above.

1. Bridge the digital divide within the country — close the remaining urban-rural gaps in connectivity, pricing, and last-mile coverage.
2. Raise public- and private-sector understanding of the role of ICT — through Kyrgyz-language content on social media and YouTube, and regular training for organisational decision-makers. The proposed indicator is the volume of ICT-related vocabulary entering everyday business discussion.
3. Strengthen communications infrastructure — IXP development, additional fibre routes, redundancy for cross-border links.
4. Encourage High Tech Park residents to open development and service offices in Osh — using municipal premises offered without charge, subsidies on utilities and local taxes, and soft loans for hardware, in exchange for hiring and training local staff.
5. Stimulate local and regional system integrators — companies that adapt international software for local sectoral needs and serve as the practical ICT-implementation layer for businesses that do not have in-house IT departments.
6. Build youth ICT entrepreneurship capacity — competitions, incubators, mentor programmes targeted at the Osh demographic.
7. Develop human capital — coordinated upgrade of training pipelines from secondary education through to post-graduate certification.
8. Stimulate cooperation between academic institutions and private organisations — internships, applied research, joint curriculum design.
9. Tight integration with priority economic sectors — context-localised training and digital tools for light industry, food processing and agriculture, trade, and services. These are the sectors where ICT adoption produces the most immediate measurable competitiveness gain in Osh oblast.
10. International specialist certification systems — Cisco, Microsoft, AWS, and equivalent certifications as a way of making Osh-trained specialists legible to international clients without forcing them to migrate.
11. Strengthen entrepreneurship in digital space — e-commerce, digital services, content production for export.
12. Cooperation with Kyrgyz diaspora communities worldwide — using the diaspora as a routing layer into international markets and as a pipeline for returning experienced specialists.

The most concrete near-term recommendation is direction four. The proposal is that the Osh mayor’s office, oblast administration, and local development partners create an unusually attractive package for Bishkek-based High Tech Park residents to open offices in Osh: free municipal premises wired for internet, subsidised utilities and local taxes, soft loans for fixed assets (computers, servers, office furniture), and underwritten travel and lodging for technical speakers in exchange for delivering targeted training to local audiences. The mechanism is straightforward — make it cheaper to operate a development team in Osh than in Bishkek for the first eighteen months — and addresses the human-capital problem from the demand side rather than from the supply side. Graduates do not have to migrate if the work moves to where the graduates are.

The Stakeholder Map and What It Says About Capacity

One of the more useful sections of the report is the stakeholder map, which sets out who actually influences ICT development in the oblast and how they currently interact (or fail to). The institutional layer includes the Osh mayor’s office and oblast administration; the technology layer includes Osh Technopark itself, the four backbone ISPs, the last-mile providers, and the local IT companies; the human-capital layer includes Osh universities and technical colleges, Bishkek-based training providers running outreach in the south, and the youth-organisation layer including IT-focused NGOs; the donor layer at the time of writing was led by GIZ’s Sustainable Economic Growth programme but also included USAID, Soros, Christensen Fund, and the EU’s Central Asia programmes. The report’s diagnostic is that none of these layers were yet routinely communicating with the others, and that the absence of a single coordinating function — a role the Osh Technopark could in principle play, with sufficient organisational strengthening — was itself one of the binding constraints on the regional ICT trajectory.

The acknowledgements page names the people who carried the work: Nazira Matkadyrova at GIZ for facilitating the research; Arstan Zhusupov and his team, who took on the leadership of Osh Technopark during the research period and worked through vision, mission, and operational planning with the consulting team; and Ikbol Isakov and colleagues for their cooperation in running the focus groups. The report frames itself, deliberately, as the start of a process rather than a finished plan — a baseline document the regional ICT community can argue with, refine, and actually use over the next five years.

Field Work: Three Trips, Multiple Sessions, Hands-On Capacity Building

The Roadmap was not a desk exercise. Aziz Soltobaev and Alexandra Ishchenko made three field trips to Osh across the research period: June 10–12, June 24–25, and a final visit on August 29, 2019. Together those trips added up to roughly ten overnight stays — enough time to conduct structured interviews with ISPs, government representatives, university departments, and private sector players; to run focus groups with the local IT community organised by Ikbol Isakov and his colleagues; and to work through multiple ideation sessions on the ground with the Osh Technopark team.

The work with Arstan Zhusupov and the Technopark team went beyond data collection. The sessions involved building out the organisation’s mission, vision, and strategic goals from scratch — working through what the Technopark was actually for, who its stakeholders were, and what it would need to do over the next three years to function as a real hub rather than an address. That process produced two deliverables alongside the Roadmap: a full organisational diagnostic of Osh Technopark, and a detailed operating plan covering training calendars, course curricula, forum formats, and target KPIs through 2023. The operating plan projected 1,500 ICT course graduates in 2020 alone, with a three-year cumulative reach of 100,000 people through training, events, and forum activity — built up from a week-by-week programme co-designed with the Technopark team during the field visits.

The knowledge-sharing dimension ran in both directions. The field team brought frameworks — business model canvas, stakeholder analysis, design-thinking methods, startup ecosystem benchmarks from Bishkek — and worked through them interactively with the Technopark team and local community rather than delivering finished documents. The sessions were structured around Osh-specific constraints: what a training programme looks like when most potential participants are small business owners who cannot leave work for a full day, what the demand from light-industry and food-processing employers actually looks like when you go and ask them, and what a realistic pathway from a Bishkek IT company opening a satellite office in Osh would require. The Roadmap is the published output of that process; the organisational capacity built during the visits is the less visible one.

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Report Details and Download

Title (Russian)	Дорожная карта развития ИКТ в городе Ош на базе Ош технопарк
Title (English)	Osh City ICT Development Roadmap 2019–2024
Consultant	Aziz Soltobaev (lead consultant; individual engagement via GIZ tender, on the basis of KG Labs ecosystem work); Alexandra Ishchenko (field team)
Funder	GIZ «Sustainable Economic Growth» programme; facilitator: Nazira Matkadyrova
Local partners	Osh Technopark (Arstan Zhusupov and team during research period); Ikbol Isakov and colleagues (focus group cooperation)
Report dated	August 2019
Published	6 November 2019
Roadmap horizon	2019–2024 (five-year plan)
Methodology	Evidence-based research; desk study + personal interviews + focus groups + observation; included organisational diagnostic of Osh Technopark with operational action plan
Field visits	3 trips to Osh (June 10–12; June 24–25; August 29, 2019); ~10 overnights total; team: Aziz Soltobaev + Alexandra Ishchenko
Additional deliverables	Osh Technopark organisational diagnostic; Osh Technopark Operating Plan 2020–2023 (training calendars, course curricula, forum formats, KPI targets)
Download	Osh ICT Development Roadmap 2019-2024 (PDF, Russian)