{"id":8132,"date":"2024-07-23T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-23T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/karakol-dpi-focus-groups-mes-2024\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T21:51:40","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T15:51:40","slug":"karakol-dpi-focus-groups-mes-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/karakol-dpi-focus-groups-mes-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Karakol focus groups: what the Ministry of Education’s digital infrastructure looks like from a rural household"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
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DPI \u00b7 Education Ministry \u00b7 Karakol<\/p>\r\n\r\r\n\r\n

Through KG Labs we ran focus groups in Karakol and Kichi-Jargylchak on how the digital public infrastructure of the Ministry of Education and Sciences is actually used. The further a family lives from a regional centre, the more value those services hold.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

2024-07-23 \u00b7 Aziz Soltobaev \u00b7 KG Labs Foundation<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n<\/div><\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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Kyrgyzstan is in a stage of digital transformation where the moment calls for the introduction of the newest technological advances \u2014 artificial intelligence, edge computing, Platform-as-a-Service \u2014 but the reality on the ground asks for attention to other, more practical questions about digitisation first.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

For an ordinary Kyrgyz citizen, the use of digital documents \u2014 driver’s licence, ID card, birth certificate \u2014 to present on demand is already routine. More than 150 government services are available online. Electronic signing of documents is gaining ground. The further a citizen lives from a regional administrative centre, the more valuable these services become: time and money are saved, because the service can be obtained over the internet rather than after a day’s travel to a queue.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

This is what is known in the literature as the «digital dividend» \u2014 the practical benefit of digitisation.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\n

\"Presenting
Presenting the analysis of the digital public infrastructure of the Ministry of Education and Sciences in Karakol. The focus groups grounded the assessment in real household use.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\r\n\r\n\n
\"Focus
Focus groups in Karakol. The conversation moved past the official user-journey diagrams to what the services actually feel like when a parent needs to enrol a child in a school over the summer.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

What we were doing in Karakol<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

KG Labs Public Foundation has been working on a rapid assessment of the digital public infrastructure of the Ministry of Education and Sciences of the Kyrgyz Republic. The assessment uses a structured set of metrics \u2014 drawn from the GovStack framework and the Digital Public Goods Alliance methodology \u2014 to evaluate the foundational blocks: identity, payments, data exchange, consent, and the services built on top of them.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The metrics are necessary. The metrics are not sufficient. To understand what the infrastructure does for households, you have to sit with households. That is why we spent the week in Issyk-Kul oblast running focus groups \u2014 in Karakol itself and in Kichi-Jargylchak \u2014 with parents, teachers, and local-administration staff who interact with the Ministry’s digital services regularly.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\n

\"Karakol
Karakol focus group, second session. School directors and parents at the same table; the failure modes they raised were not the failure modes the centre tracks.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\r\n\r\n\n
\"Karakol
Karakol focus group on what the Ministry's digital services look like from outside Bishkek. The closer you sit to Bishkek, the more the infrastructure resembles its diagram. The further, the less.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Place anchor: Kichi-Jargylchak<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Kichi-Jargylchak is a village in the south of the Issyk-Kul basin. It is not Karakol. It is the kind of place that does not appear on the typical Bishkek user-experience presentation of the T\u00fcnd\u00fck platform. Parents here use the Ministry’s services because the alternative \u2014 travelling to Karakol and back in a day \u2014 costs them work hours and bus fare and, sometimes, the trip is wasted because the office staff member they need is not in.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

When the digital services work, the dividend is enormous. When they fail, the failure is not visible from the dashboard in Bishkek. The household simply does not enrol the child that week, or does not get the school certificate by the deadline, or pays a cousin to make the trip on their behalf.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The honest reading is that the digital infrastructure is delivering meaningful value to households in the south of Issyk-Kul oblast already. It is also failing in patterns that the centre does not see, because the centre’s failure-tracking is based on transaction logs, and a transaction that does not get attempted does not generate a log entry.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

What this means for the rapid assessment<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The Sary-Chelek and Karakol findings are now feeding back into the GovStack scoring. Some metrics in the standard methodology are missing the part of the system where the highest-value transactions are happening \u2014 the rural household using a service it would otherwise have to travel half a day to access. Other metrics are over-weighting the urban-Bishkek experience because that is what the user-journey research most commonly samples.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The fix is methodological, not technical. We are not proposing new infrastructure on the back of these focus groups. We are proposing a different way of measuring how the existing infrastructure is performing \u2014 one that gives appropriate weight to the rural-household experience, where the marginal value of the service is highest.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

That is the kind of work that has to happen before «introduce more AI» or «introduce edge computing» is a useful next step. The system that AI rides on top of needs to be measured honestly first, with its actual users sitting in the room.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Where this fits<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The Ministry of Education focus-group track is one input. A parallel set of focus groups is being planned for other Ministries \u2014 Social Development, Digital Development \u2014 to give the full DPI rapid assessment the regional grounding it needs.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The output of this assessment will be a public report that scores the Kyrgyz DPI against a structured rubric and that identifies the foundational blocks where investment, methodological cleanup, or simple maintenance will produce the biggest gains for households. The report will be aimed at the readers who can actually use it: ministerial decision-makers, programme managers, and the donor community that funds digitisation work in Central Asia.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kyrgyzstan is in a stage of digital transformation where the moment calls for the introduction of the newest technological advances \u2014 artificial intelligence, edge computing, Platform-as-a-Service \u2014 but the reality on the ground asks for attention to other, more practical questions about digitisation first. For an ordinary Kyrgyz citizen, the use of digital documents \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8128,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[266],"tags":[855,297,847,817,730,406,854,13,853,663],"class_list":["post-8132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-digital-public-infrastructure","tag-digital-dividends","tag-digital-public-infrastructure","tag-dpi","tag-issyk-kul-oblast","tag-karakol","tag-kg-labs","tag-kichi-jargylchak","tag-kyrgyzstan","tag-ministry-of-education","tag-theme-tunduk"],"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\/8132","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=8132"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8165,"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8132\/revisions\/8165"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}