What access to education do school children have in rural Kyrgyzstan?
Aidai Kadyralieva
Aman from Mogol village shares his memories.
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 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.
This data story was written by Aidai Kadyralieva, a ForSet data-communication fellow.