Every fifth child in rural areas of Kyrgyzstan does not have a computer or gadget with Internet access. This means the opportunity to study online.
“When my mother went out to trade at the bazaar, she left her phone at home. During that time, my brother and I had online classes. We took turns missing lessons, giving the phone to each other. My sister studied in the afternoon, but still the phone would overheat because of the heavy load, and sometimes it turned off by itself. Sometimes there was no phone connection at all. We had to look for it outside the street”, – Aman from Mogol village in Jalal-Abad region shares his memories.
Aman is one of thousands of schoolchildren in Kyrgyzstan for whom 2020 was an unusual year: his father could not come from Russia for months, and his studies became entirely online.
In Kyrgyzstan, every fourth person is a school child. When distance education was introduced in Spring 2020, not every family was equipped with the necessary technology for continuous learning.
For 2019, the national poverty rate was 20.1%. This is without taking into account the economic crisis, which came because of the pandemic the following year. This fact also significantly affected the availability of gadgets in families with schoolchildren.
In urban areas, 82% have at least one cell phone with Internet access. While in rural areas, where Aman’s family lives, this figure reaches only 77%. In the remaining cases, people have a regular button phone.
Overall, 50% of Kyrgyzstan’s population lives off the World Wide Web. This means that every second resident has no Internet: neither mobile, nor wired.
The situation is better if we analyze the overall connectivity of mobile operators across the country, taking data from such major providers as “O!”, “Beeline” and “Megacom”. In total, it turns out that only 66.4% of residents have connectivity in the regions, where they live. In Mogol village, where Aman and his siblings study, there is a tower of “O!” mobile operator. It is what allows them to stay in touch and check chats with others, although sometimes this connection is not perfect too.
School children like Aman had an alternative for online studying. That was television. The Ministry of Education and Science prepared filmed lessons, which were broadcast on TV. But a technical difficulty could happen: on average, only 2 of the poorest households out of 5 had electricity.
Despite the free mobile apps provided and the classes broadcasting online on 3 national TV channels, in Kyrgyzstan there are still families without access to the Internet, communications and electricity in their houses. And not every child has his own cell phone. This was 2020 year 2020 – Year of the Regional Development, Digitalization and Child Support.