The ESCAP secretariat, with support from the Russian Federation, is implementing a two-and-a-half-year project, which started in 2024, on “Strengthening policies and regulatory frameworks of digital public services (DPS) for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in North and Central Asia in support of the Asia Pacific Information Superhighway (APIS) Action Plan 2022-2026”. The aim of the project is to strengthen the existing policies and regulatory framework of digital public services in NCA countries for the benefit of SMEs (see Annex 1 project brief).
The meeting in St. Petersburg will conclude a series of events, subregional and national workshops, which brought together policy practitioners and businesses who are planning, designing, maintaining, and using digital public services daily. The discussions among this network, along with the desk research and surveys, were captured in several analytical and knowledge products, available on the ESCAP website.
The key preliminary findings of the project highlight the lack of an international platform for exchanges on DPS practices, co-planning, and common approaches, which led to regional fragmentation and an inability to achieve meaningful interconnection between the DPS systems. Another key highlight is the need to assess the maturity of the DPS, tracking the success of digitising, digitalising, and creating digital native services targeting SMEs, such as a digital business card.
The platform for regional technical and policy DPS communities, equipped with analytical tools, can support the vision of the future where DPS systems in Asia Pacific, building on shared approaches, can communicate with each other, exchange documents, provide legal certainty, and support SME internationalisation. Fostering harmonised frameworks for DPS development through a multilateral dialogue platform, with the support of tools such as maturity assessment frameworks, could be a key element for the ESCAP countries’ digital cooperation agenda.
