Digital equality in Kazakhstan: between innovation and unequal access

Pay a tax bill in Kazakhstan, and you might be done in thirty seconds. The country’s e-government platform has transformed how citizens interact with the state; fintech super-apps handle utility payments, money transfers, and tax returns in a few taps. For anyone from a country still reliant on in-person queues and paper forms, the contrast is striking.

Living abroad, I notice this acutely. Many of the digital conveniences that Kazakhstanis now take for granted remain unavailable in countries that consider themselves technological leaders. They are hamstrung by legacy systems too entrenched to change. Kazakhstan has hosted Digital Bridge, one of Central Asia’s most prominent annual technology forums, and is pushing ahead with government plans for a dedicated artificial intelligence center.

But ambition for rapid technological progress is not the same as inclusion. Technology should serve everyone. And in Kazakhstan, as across much of the world, it does not yet do so equally. Digital transformation reshapes not just innovation, but the labor market, education, and the basic texture of daily life. A person without reliable power, a working device, or the skills to use one is not merely inconvenienced; they are increasingly left behind. What follows is an attempt to map what would need to be in place for digital progress to reach everyone.

Energy: the foundation of the digital future

None of this starts without electricity. Kazakhstan’s energy deficit during the 2025-2026 autumn-winter period was expected to reach up to 330 million kilowatt hours per month, volumes that the country had to purchase from Russia and Uzbekistan. The Ministry of Energy projects that the gap will widen to more than 5 billion kilowatt hours annually by 2029.

Powering energy-intensive infrastructure, including AI laboratories, while ensuring that rural communities and vulnerable households are not left behind demands urgent policy attention. So does reducing dependence on neighbouring countries at a time when climate-related disruptions are becoming more frequent.

A recent CAPS Unlock report, Opportunities for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Kazakhstan’s Green Economy found that Kazakhstan has yet to unlock the potential of its small and medium-sized businesses in driving the green transition. Expanding household and business uptake of renewable energy would reduce dependence on imported power and begin to ease the structural deficit from the demand side.

Devices and the accessibility of technology

According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), basic smartphones are now within reach of most people globally. Handsets costing around $50 are widely available. Laptops are a different matter, however. In 2021, the most recent year for which data is available, and the moment at which the pandemic had made home computing a near-necessity, only 53% of Kazakhstani households owned one.

The regional picture is uneven. In Almaty, 72% of households had a laptop; in Almaty province, 38%. In Kyzylorda province, the figure dropped to 28%, in Shymkent to 31%.

Put plainly: in cities, roughly one in five people has a laptop. In the countryside, it is one in nine.

More than 70% of computer equipment in Kazakhstan is imported, which means prices track exchange rate fluctuations and global supply conditions. For a family on an average Kazakhstani income, a laptop is not a trivial purchase.

Internet and infrastructure

Around 16% of people in rural Kazakhstan, roughly 1.7 million, have no access to 4G mobile internet. A further 630,000 live entirely beyond mobile coverage. The problem is not only geographic. Four providers serve the entire national market, a level of concentration that tends to produce poor service and high prices.

The cost of change is significant. Around 16% of the population cannot afford 10GB of mobile data at the standard affordability threshold of 2% of monthly income; among the poorest households, that figure reaches 40%. Connecting 48,000 unserved households to fixed internet would cost roughly $46 million. Extending 4G to rural areas would require $650 million. Reaching the 630,000 people in areas with fewer than one person per square kilometer would require satellite solutions costing over $1 billion. 

Kazakhstan also needs to expand its internet exchange points, the physical infrastructure that routes traffic efficiently, from four to nine, and make them independent of state operators. Sustainable digital infrastructure would require some $500 million in cloud investment.

The government is, to its credit, aware of the gap. Last October, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development announced that a national program, Accessible Internet, running from 2024 to 2027, would ultimately culminate in the extension of coverage to 100% of the population. More than 1 trillion tenge ($2 billion) has been invested in telecoms infrastructure over the past three years. 

Of Kazakhstan’s 6,179 villages, 84% now have mobile internet. By the end of 2026, a further 3,000 are to be connected to the fibre backbone. By 2027, the government aims for 4G coverage across 92% of settlements and 5G in 20 cities. Satellite connectivity was to have been extended to 504 of the most remote communities by the end of 2025. Whether these targets are met in full remains to be seen. But the direction is clear, and the investment is real.

There is, however, a difference between being technically connected and being meaningfully so. 

The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) has developed a concept called “meaningful connectivity” to capture this. To be connected in a meaningful sense, a person needs a smartphone or better device, speeds of at least 4G, enough data to go online every day, and a reliable connection at home, at work, or school.

It is a deliberately practical standard: can you video-call a doctor? Submit a job application? Help your child with homework without watching the data run out? By that measure, millions of Kazakhstanis who are nominally online are not yet truly connected.

Digital literacy as a foundational skill

Access to power, a device, and a connection are still only part of the picture. The important piece is knowing how to use them.

The International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS), a major international benchmark that tests digital skills among eighth-graders across dozens of countries, found that Kazakhstani students score below the average of OECD countries, the group of mostly wealthy nations that sets the international bar.

Kazakhstan’s average score in the 2023 ICILS cycle was 407 points, against a top score of 540 for South Korea. The more telling figure: almost every second Kazakhstani eighth-grader still struggles with tasks most adults would consider basic, such as clicking a hyperlink, adding an image to a presentation, or understanding what it means to copy someone into an email.

There is genuine progress to report. The gap between city and rural students narrowed by 33 points between 2018 and 2023, with rural students showing the greatest improvement. Girls outperformed boys. Students with fewer devices at home are slowly catching up. But these are gains from a low base, and Kazakhstan recorded one of the widest gaps between its highest and lowest performers of any country in the 2018 study: 347 points between the top 5% and the bottom 5%. That is a measure of inequality, not just of average attainment.

One structural barrier is a shortage of teaching materials in digital literacy, particularly in Kazakh. Connect-Ed Foundation (full disclosure: this is an organization I founded) developed free courses in both Kazakh and Russian to begin to address this.

Digital equality as a priority of the future

Kazakhstan has built something genuinely impressive: government services that work, fintech that functions, and a technology sector that draws international attention and admiration. The paradox is that alongside all of this, a significant share of the population lives in regions without reliable internet, where laptop ownership is low and digital skills lower still. The country’s digital story has two chapters, and so far only one has been told.

Closing the gap means unglamorous work: investing in electricity infrastructure in regions that still import power, introducing real competition into a telecoms market dominated by four providers, building teaching materials in the languages people actually speak, and making devices affordable on real incomes. It means treating digital policy not as a tool for innovation rankings, but as a question of who gets left behind.

Kazakhstan has demonstrated it can move fast when it decides to. The more important question now is not how to reach the frontier of technology, but how to ensure the frontier reaches everyone.

Gulnaz Kordanova is the founder of the Connect-Ed Foundation and a specialist in digital equality.