Dear colleagues,
On behalf of Kazakhstan Gateway team, as a project coordinator for
Gateway country-level component: Kazakhstan Development Gateway, I
would like to express our attitude towards the criticism and
claims raised in Mr. Bissio and Dr. Abin's message. I believe that
most of other country teams will support our opinion and will share
their own views and experience.
As one could note from the message of the respected claimants, they
did conduct a detailed analysis of the financial aspects of the
project. But what was left out is the whole ideology and actual
achievements of the teams both on global and country levels, which is
offensive for the people, who made their best and put tremendous
efforts to launch and lead this initiative for almost 2 years through
the thorny path aggregated by different conditions in the countries.
The philosophy of the Gateway does not imply the creation of the
Portal per se, but aims at much wider multifaceted e-development
program to be implemented in participating countries. But even
speaking of this key element: the Portal, we believe that saying that
it is "unneeded initiative, which will compete unfairly and in a
damaging manner with existing country-and topic-focused Internet
sites" is absolutely groundless. To take the Kazakhstan situation,
the results of extensive studies, researches and consultations
conducted by Kazakhstan Gateway team revealed that 60% of Kazakhstan
Internet users identified the lack of interesting and useful
country-specific resources as a major obstacle for more extensive
Internet popularization and usage. In addition, our main objective is
not creating an ultimate Portal but to promote the existing ones,
assist in enhancing their quality and facilitate creation of more and
more local Internet resources and launch of additional locally
initiated e-development projects. And we've been working in this
direction within KzDG project activities.
I'd like to say that we are proud of being a part of this truly global
initiative, which currently unites the efforts of such a great number
of dedicated partners and significantly contributes to the development
process in more than 30 countries worldwide. And these Country Gateways
actually make the backbone of the whole Development Gateway ideology
and program. We are witnessing repercussion of widening the digital
gap between our countries and developed world and realize better than
anybody else the importance of such initiative as Development Gateway
and experience the results of its activities at the firsthand. Here,
in Kazakhstan, just like in most of other countries involved, Gateway
is going through its planning and start-up phases. Despite such a
short period of time this initiative attracted genuine interest and
support of representatives of various communities and is being
actively developed by highly enthusiastic and committed people. Thus,
thanks to Development Gateway initiative and InfoDev grant allocated
through this program to launch Kazakhstan Development Gateway, we
managed to accomplish a huge number of activities to consolidate
efforts of representatives of local communities interested in
E-development of the country and establish an E-development
Association - a professional legal entity co-founded by 20
organizations, which will take a lead to achieve the goals established
by Development Gateway in our country.
An important factor is that in most of the participating countries,
which gained their independence and started the democratization
process not so long ago, the ideas of e-development (development
through application of information technologies) are also still very
young, not adopted and well-known. Even given the fact that it already
found strong acknowledgement on the side of local communities, they
still have a "fear" of the openness and opportunities, which can be
provided by new economy, and Development Gateway is called to help
them to overcome this fear through educating and sharing the knowledge
and best practices. Thus, support of World Bank and future Development
Gateway Foundation as a key facilitator is indeed vital for Country
Gateways at this point. Therefore, to wrap up this project would mean
to berry the results achieved in the countries so far.
Best regards,
Saltanat Shalakhmetova,
Project Coordinator
Kazakhstan Development Gateway
tel: office 7-3272-583691
cell 7-300-722-5528
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