ASTANA – The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Nazarbayev University Innovation Cluster (NURIS) launched a project to raise global visibility, support, and publicity of Kazakh open-source IT products, UNICEF Kazakhstan reported on Feb. 24.
Photo credit: unicef.org.
Every product will pass the Digital Public Goods Alliance’s (DPGA) global standards verification to enter the DGPA global registry, which provides access to international recognition and implements its global developments, such as apps, data visualization tools, and educational programs, to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).
“Implementing already-developed digital solutions may speed up important social projects, facilitating the realization process financially and technically,” UNICEF Kazakhstan Education Specialist Tatiana Aderkhina said.
The UNICEF project examined essential social needs in Kazakhstan, revealing the country’s weak points in areas such as the digital economy and innovation, employment and skills development, education and early childhood development, inclusion and accessibility for people with disabilities, digital healthcare services, and children’s online safety. The research also found that most Kazakh platforms lack access options for individuals with visual or hearing impairments.
Twelve of the 516 Kazakh startup projects can potentially obtain Digital Public Goods (DPG) status. Education partners will suggest utilizing UNICEF-NURIS digital public goods to enhance access to IT solutions for schoolchildren and improve their programming abilities.
Last year, Kazakhstan launched the pioneering Central Asia DPG startup Accessible Kazakhstan which provides information on the accessibility of public facilities for people with limited mobility. The second Kazakh DPG project, Ozim mobile app, helps parents to access inclusive information about early childhood development.
The Digital Public Goods Alliance is a multi-stakeholder initiative endorsed by the UN Secretary-General that seeks to speed up the achievement of the SDG in low- and middle-income countries by facilitating the discovery, development, use and investment in digital public goods.
The DPG Standard represents a set of specifications and guidance documents developed to reach the maximum consensus on whether something complies with the definition of digital public goods outlined by the UN Secretary-General in the 2020 Roadmap for Digital Cooperation.
