Oleksii Sobolev, CEO Prozorro.Sale
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 Ukraine.
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 largest holder of data in Ukraine is the government. In order to unlock its value a number of initiatives have been launched by the government and the civil society. One of them is “open data”, and how it is used for accountability, innovation and social impact. As measured by the Open Data Barometer, the country ranks relatively high on open data, scoring 47 points (way above Turkey’s 31 and slightly lower than Italy’s 50). Also, the barometer shows that the data is extensively used for political and business impact while the social impact is lacking.
In 2018 Ukraine has conducted a study on the economic impact of open data. It showed that the impact of open data could generate additional USD 1.4bn or 1% of gdp by 2025. Afterwards a series of studies conducted for usage of date in different sectors. One has found that the data is being extensively used for anti corruption and compliance purposes, with services like opendatabot or YouControl allowing the banks to automate KYC procedures. Or CostUkraine that is using the data to monitor road construction projects for their quality and costs.
Another example is Prozorro.Sale – Ukraine’s award winning e-auction system. The main principle of the system is “everybody sees everything”. In practice that means that all the data about the auctions and participants is available in open data machine readable format. This led to creation of the whole ecosystem of companies that use the data to attract bidders or provide business intelligence and analysis of different sectors. This transparency and data usage has led to increased participation in the auctions, helping to generate additional USD 500m to various budgets.
Ukraine loves transparency and open data and is working hard to increase their impact.
