In a focus-group room in Karakol in February 2019, the discussion was supposed to be about the labour market. It became, very quickly, about expectations. Several of the participants were students or recent graduates of universities in the Issyk-Kul region. They were not waiting to finish their degrees before looking for IT work. They were planning to enrol in short-term certificate courses \u2014 three months, six months, a year \u2014 and start applying with those certificates in hand. Their belief was that the certificate, plus a portfolio, would get them a salary above the regional average. Whether that belief was realistic was, in their telling, beside the point. They had already decided.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
That was one of five focus groups KG Labs ran across Bishkek, Osh, Jalal-Abad and Karakol over two and a half months. Alongside the focus groups, the team \u2014 Begaim Muratbekova, Aleksandra Ishchenko, Paulina Kotuleva, and myself \u2014 completed an online survey with 70 respondents and a paper survey with 36 more, conducted 18 in-depth interviews, and built a primary-data layer by scraping Telegram IT channels, LinkedIn profiles, and freelance platforms to estimate the gender breakdown that the official statistics did not contain. We negotiated for unpublished data with the National Statistics Committee and the State Tax Service. The whole exercise was commissioned by the USAID Enterprise Competitiveness Project \u2014 Nathan Associates was the contractor for USAID’s side of it \u2014 and KG Labs implemented the entire study.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
The brief was straightforward: tell the government, the donor community, and the private sector what shape the IT sector in the Kyrgyz Republic was actually in. Not in projections. Not in policy aspirations. In numbers, in places, and in subsectors that could be named.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Here is what the count looked like in 2017, the most recent year for which the National Statistics Committee data was complete at the time of the research.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Source: National Statistics Committee data compiled in the IT Sector Analysis, USAID ECP \/ KG Labs, June 2019.<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The single most-cited number from that table, in the months after the report circulated, was the doubling of sector revenue between 2016 and 2017. It is also the one that needs the most context. A sector growing from 241 million to 518 million KGS in a year is growing fast in percentage terms because the base is small. Three percent of GDP is not a structural transformation. It is a wedge \u2014 visible, expanding, but still narrow.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The labour-market chapter was where the work mattered most. Demand for IT specialists in 2019 was running at roughly twice supply under the conditions the team observed. Universities were producing on average around 8,650 graduates per year from IT-related programmes between 2013 and 2017, with women accounting for 21.3% of that figure. Vocational schools added another 1,550 a year, women 29.3%. But enrolment in IT programmes at universities had fallen 47% over five years. Short-term courses \u2014 KSSDA’s IT Academy, Attractor, DevCIT at AUCA, and dozens of smaller training providers \u2014 were absorbing the demand the universities were releasing. Karakol was an extreme version of a national pattern.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n In Jalal-Abad the picture was different again. The focus group there raised, unprompted, that no academic teaching staff in the city were available to teach IT subjects at university level. Not few. None. The shortage was not a wage issue at the senior end of the market \u2014 it was a presence issue at the foundational end.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The four subsectors that emerged from the analysis as having the strongest near-term potential were software development outsourcing, software publishing, e-commerce, and animation. Animation was the late addition. KG Labs had been planning to write up three subsectors when the High Technology Park’s resident data came in showing that 20% of total HTP revenue was being generated by a small number of animation studios producing children’s-channel content for YouTube, with end markets in the United States, Canada, and Britain. Three of those studios alone reported around $1.2 million USD in revenue in 2017 \u2014 a figure on the same order of magnitude as the largest software development companies inside the HTP. Approximately 44% of the workforce in those studios was women. A subsector worth naming.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The estimate the report ran in Chapter Three was that the country could create 5,000 to 7,500 entry-level IT jobs in the following three years at the demand levels observed in 2019, with a multiplier-driven 15,000 to 22,500 jobs in adjacent non-technical roles \u2014 sales, customer service, operations. The estimate was conservative, and it was offered with the constraints attached. Brain drain was running high; senior specialists were leaving as soon as their experience became internationally portable. Banks were not lending to firms whose primary assets were intangible. Venture funds did not exist in any formalised sense. Angel investment happened in private and informally; there was no association.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n What the work showed, more than anything, was that the sector was being driven by a small number of compounding decisions made by individuals \u2014 students choosing six-month certificates over four-year degrees, animators choosing English-language YouTube markets over local distribution, freelancers routing their income through Payoneer rather than local banking. The aggregate numbers in the table above were a downstream effect of those individual choices. Policy could shape the conditions; it could not run ahead of them.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The report was delivered to USAID in June 2019. Most of the data in it was the first time those figures had been compiled in one place from the primary sources.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n A year on, in the middle of a pandemic that has emptied office floors across Bishkek and pushed every team that could go remote to do exactly that, the report’s labour-market numbers and its observations about payment rails, freelance income, and intangible-asset banking read differently than they did in March 2019. Some of what was a forward-looking constraint then became an immediate constraint by April 2020. Some of what was an animation-industry curiosity then turned into the part of the IT sector least disrupted by the crisis. This series \u2014 seven follow-on posts published between September and December 2020 \u2014 works through the report chapter by chapter, with the field material that didn’t fit into the original delivery, and with the hindsight of the year between then and now.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Forward to the rest of the series:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Source: USAID Enterprise Competitiveness Project (2019). Analysis of the Information Technology Sector in the Kyrgyz Republic. Implemented by KG Labs Public Foundation; commissioned by USAID ECP \/ Nathan Associates \/ ACDI-VOCA, June 2019. Field research January\u2013March 2019 across Bishkek, Osh, Jalal-Abad, and Karakol: 106-respondent survey, 18 in-depth interviews, 5 focus groups.<\/em><\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a focus-group room in Karakol in February 2019, the discussion was supposed to be about the labour market. It became, very quickly, about expectations. Several of the participants were students or recent graduates of universities in the Issyk-Kul region. They were not waiting to finish their degrees before looking for IT work. They were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[357],"tags":[732,344,214,729,727,630,730,13,415,731,728],"class_list":["post-7920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-and-evidence","tag-animation","tag-bishkek","tag-e-commerce","tag-ict-labor-market","tag-it-sector","tag-geo-jalal-abad","tag-karakol","tag-kyrgyzstan","tag-osh","tag-outsourcing","tag-usaid"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"ru","enabled_languages":["en","ru"],"languages":{"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"ru":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7920\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\r\n\r\n
\r\n \r\nIndicator<\/th>\r\n Kyrgyz Republic, 2017<\/th>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<\/thead>\r\n \r\n IT sector workforce (NSC)<\/td>\r\n ~27,600<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n \r\n Registered IT companies<\/td>\r\n 2,083<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n \r\n IT sector revenue<\/td>\r\n 518 million KGS (~$7.4M USD)<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n \r\n IT sector revenue, 2016<\/td>\r\n 241 million KGS (~$3.45M USD)<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n \r\n Sector contribution to GDP<\/td>\r\n ~3%<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n \r\n Average monthly wage, «Information and Communications» sector (2018)<\/td>\r\n 31,636 KGS (~$453 USD)<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n \r\n National average monthly wage (2018)<\/td>\r\n 16,218 KGS (~$232 USD)<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<\/tbody>\r\n<\/table><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n