Arseny Sivitsky, Director of the Center for Strategic and Foreign Policy Studies (Minsk, Belarus)
In 2020, the European Commission adopted its European Data Strategy. On November 25, 2020, the European Commission issued the Data Governance Act, the first proposal regarding the implementation of the Strategy. With the Strategy implementation, the EC is targeting to reach €829 billion value of the data economy in 2025 in EU from €301 billion (2.4% of EU GDP) in 2018.
StrategEast has interviewed leading experts from Eastern Partnership countries to hear about the role of the data economy in their home countries. Here are the answers from the expert on Belarus.
Does your country use data-sharing platforms and ecosystems? What are the perspectives of data economy in your country, can it bring economic benefits to businesses and citizens?
The formation of a single information space for electronic services based on the integration of information systems and provision of access to open data was declared one of the priorities for the development of the digital economy in the framework of the State Program of Digital Economy and Information Society Development for 2016 – 2020. However, Belarus cannot boast of significant results in the creation of data-sharing platforms and ecosystems. Already today the National portal of open data is available on the Internet at data.gov.by, with 100 sets of open data published. However, it duplicates mostly data of the National Statistical portal of the Republic of Belarus. And the goals and tasks assigned to this portal are not quite clear for potential users.
The current political crisis in Belarus also does not facilitate development of the data-sharing platforms and ecosystems. The Belarusian civil society was actively using such open data platforms during the August 2020 presidential elections to secure transparency of the results.
In addition, there are several platforms that are pretending to form an ecosystem for direct digital democracy, mutual aid, and coordination of collective actions. The Belarusian authorities consider such platforms illegal and in some cases even perceive them as a threat to national security when it comes to the opposition initiatives.
Even when it comes to unpoliticized initiatives such as development of an automated system for monitoring and analyzing the situation with COVID-19 pandemic by the IT-company EPAM Systems for Belarusian Healthcare Ministry the face opposition from the government officials. This case probably indicates the low level of governance and preparedness of Belarusian bureaucracy for digital transformations.
