The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> ILAHA BAGHIROVA: So, I wanted to start the platform, today we will have three speakers. They will give detailed information to you. So, mygov platform is for government that integrates citizens, state entities, state entities businesses into a unified e‑services platform. This innovative system aims to provide a comprehensive area of cutting-edge digital services fostering collaboration and efficiency.
Through mygov platform citizens gain information provided by government agencies enabling them to engage with services electronically, acquire edocuments, verify the accuracy of the information as well as manage the process of sharing their data with other institutions.
This innovative system aims to provide a comprehensive array of cutting-edge digital services and fostering collaboration and efficiency.
So, I would like to introduce our first speaker today, Mr. Orkhan Ismayilov. He's the head of strategic partnerships of international cooperation department at IDA. Please give applause to him and he will introduce you to mygov platform.
>> ORKHAN ISMAYILOV: Thank you very much, Ilaha. Actually, today I will not only talk about mygov but try to share our Azerbaijan digital government transformation. My goal is one biggest part of this strategy.
Firstly, we should fix our clicker. Can you change the slide, please? This is our digital transformation concept. There are three components. The first one is digital government. The second one is digital society. And the last one is digital businesses.
We are understanding that there is a three main component, and that's why we tried to establish our digital innovation on these components. There are some enablers which can enable to the digital level development. The first one is infrastructure. The second one is laws, regulations, and clauses. And we're also trying to improve our AI data and cybersecurity strategy. And the last one is human capital. Human capital is so crucial for us. Because we understand that without proper human pull, we cannot enable our digital transformation strategy.
That's why we are trying to improve digital awareness and digital literacy in our country. So, there is a digital academy programme and digital leadership programme, which we are trying to make our Ambassadors in all government entities which we can speak the same language with them.
These are our strategic programme for 2024 and 2026. We're trying to create life event services. We're trying to digitalise all intergovernmental process, correspondence, and other things. And we are trying to establish government and our new strategy is after implementing open data portal, our main aim is to shift our strategy from open data portal to the open API. These are some strategic APIs in digital society and digital businesses.
We have a programme which we are trying to help the SMEs to digitalisation of the SMEs, and we have digital library, which we provide this type of SMEs with digital tools.
And now, I will talk about our digital government products. The first one is digital bridge. Digital bridge is the backbone of digital government. You cannot imagine digital government without a digital bridge. This is our national information exchange system within the government entities.
If you want to establish digital government, firstly, you should create your information bridge system. Then you can establish your digital government on the top of this system.
As you know, we are the environmental within the country we hosted CoP 29 in our country this year. That's why this type of service is to help us save environment in this way.
And these are main statistics about digital bridge system. There are more than 71 government agencies who integrated into our system. From the beginning of the implementation of digital bridge (Audio breaking up) more than one billion transactions have been conducted through our system.
As I mentioned already, this system helps us to save more than 10,000 annually. Our country and capital city and our calculation through this system we saved through our botanical garden (Audio breaking up).
I will show a brief video about digital bridge which make our vision more clear. There is no voice with the video, but there are subtitles. So, you can catch it from subtitles.
(Captioned video playing)
Our next platform is mygov which is a portal to ensure a secure, transparent, and user-friendly digital connection between citizens and government and businesses.
In our country there is more than 2,000 digital (Audio breaking up) exchanged. Digital ID is officially accepted by all of government and businesses. It means that in our country physical document is equal to digital documents. If citizens can get any type of governmental or private services without their physical ID. There is not only ID card. There is driver license and other (Audio breaking up) in the system. And we are provided this information system with this information and citizen certificates through the mygov portal.
And we are trying to establish our digital public services on the page of life events. Because we understand that (?) not only our country but digital government services created on the basis of the services. But we now understand that it's so easy for citizens to find the proper services based on life events. For example, birth, death, marriage, registration is already digitalised in our country.
And we are trying to create proactive services. It means, for example, when the citizen reach pension age, there is (Audio breaking up) government entities. Government proactively sends notification to citizens that you have reached your pension age, and you can take your bank card, for example, from the same bank.
And this is the next video about mygov. I hope the sound problem is fixed already. Let's check.
(Captioned video playing)
And our next product is the single on system, citizens can enter any integrated private, digital portals. It helps us to avoid to use several customers login information in several portals. With the registration need to enter all governmental services. (Audio breaking up) about this product. The next video is about digital (?).
(Captioned video playing)
This is Sima, a new generation of advanced digital signature of our country. This is based on face recognition technologies and AI‑based. These are about usage of this product.
The last one is digital document circulation subsystem. All of our intergovernmental offshore correspondence is digitalised. There is no need to share (Audio breaking up) between governmental entities. And my last video is about this product.
(Captioned video playing)
I would like to say this these are our other digital government solutions like e‑social, e‑court, e‑procurement, e‑education, e‑healthcare, e‑agro, et cetera. At the end of the day, due to our ‑‑ this type (Audio breaking up) we have increased our places nine times in the UN government index. So, thank you very much for your attention. Now Ilaha, the stage is yours.
>> ILAHA BAGHIROVA: Thank you, Mr. Ismayilov. Now we will continue the interesting session. The head of the marketing and department at IDA. Welcome, Laman.
>> LAMAN AKBAROVA: Nice to meet you all. We're going to talk about the communication products that Mr. Ismayilov mentioned. Mygov which we've presented a ready product for our audience and applied the 360 marketing communication strategy. That's me. I'm the head of brand and marketing communications in our agency. So basically, we're working with all kind of products, B2B, G2B, and G2C, all kinds of products that were mentioned by Orkhan.
So, we will start with what is mygov. I bet you guys already know from the presentation, we will go so you can catch the whole concept here. Mygov is an open unified government platform that via digitalisation will simplify the life of our citizens, the citizens of Azerbaijan. What mygov is there for? The main reasons we have indicated for ourselves in order to build the communication strategy is, of course, to provide the product that will ease the life of our citizens in Azerbaijan. And also, we're a government sector, we need to sustain and develop the relationship between our citizens and our government.
True to say there are not a lot of products like ours. Government was never ‑‑ I would say never, but seldomly connecting and representing the products straightforward to the citizens. So, this is something we're bringing in Azerbaijan.
So, were there any challenges? Of course. Of course, there is no country without challenge. There is no product without challenge. Same goes with mygov. I have listed three of them. There are more of them. But the main ones that we have indicated for ourselves are strong presence of offline services. We're kind of conservative as a country, as a population. We pile up our documents. If you go to my grandmother's house, you will see the special place she collects her documents. If you go to a person over 50‑year‑olds will not equal the digital with the physical ones. Offline provider is working very fast and easing the life of the population ten years ago. This is our main competitor and the main governing body we are highway competing with.
Also, mentality of the population. As I mentioned my grandmother and the general population in Azerbaijan. And integration of services and documentation in timely manner. When we talk about mygov, it's not just an app which you can open and have everything inside, it's an ongoing process. We bring one documentation, then bring the second kind of services. It has to be communicated in the right target audience on the right channels.
So, as I said, we created anticipation. We didn't want to just say hi, hello, this is mygov, download it. We wanted to make it interesting for our citizens, something exciting, something they would wait for. That's why we started with looking into the concept of the whole app. And what we came up with is that mygov is a point of connection if you talk about the abstract of the whole app. A point where citizens meet government. And the point where processes start and will eventually end. And this is something that only we give on the market.
The application where you will get in, start your process, and you will end your process without going anywhere physically or spending your time on things that doesn't matter like traffic. Instead spend time with your family and your friends and leave and live a happy life.
And that's exactly where we took it as a main point, where the process will start and where will end. Our creative idea is to start here. I will explain what we mean by start here.
Mygov starts here. So, this is the point where life without queues starts, where birth registration starts, where comfort starts, where digital starts, and where the future of government services starts.
In order to make the communication successful and not only Azerbaijan, but it's very important to have both the functional and emotional benefits, especially in our case. When we talk about simplification of life, we're talking about being free that we will give to our citizens. When we talk about staying connect the, we're talking about feeling connected. When we're saying good user experience, the user stays in control.
Why it's important? Of course, we have researched. Of course we're not the first country, we never said we were the first country bringing a product like that. As a turned out, a lot of governments they believe and they have adopted it that the benefits, as I said, the functional benefit, they have to be trusted into material and emotions in order to make it successful. It's very important to position as a responsive attractive and that's exactly what we did.
We are positioned as responsive, protective, trust worthy. We are not saying this is the app for you. We're saying this app makes you feel something. I will tell you more about this in the next slide. And what really matters in here is that government, here, I, as a government, am by your side wherever you are because I care. The I care moment is something crucial.
When you go to the mission statement, you can see mygov's mission is to enhance the quality of life for our citizens and providing easy request efficient ‑‑ that's what we wanted to portray as an agency. (Caring for each and every citizen) this is something that the government actually has the care starts here, the moment that the government cares about you starts with mygov.
When we go back to the product, mygov is not only about digital documentation. It's not only about the starting and ending point. It's about the services it’s bringing. So digital documentation, the one Orkhan mentioned before, digital ID, and there's a driver license. When we go to the life events, there are three life events we have started communicating and we have right now and we're having an upcoming platform next year for three more. I'll talk about them in more detail. And digital services, there are lots of them. I will show you examples of communication in here.
So, as I said, we went to the mygov as physical project. We've decided to communicate it in 360 and show that the government can communicate in the private sector. That's why we have a TV copy, we have radio placement, we have BTL starting in the regions as well. We have massive PR both for our Minister side and also from the influencing side in the e‑news and on TV and also social media which everyone knows is a powerful tool in any country right now.
I will show you all the piece of content, of course the digital literacy is mainly developed in the capital city and less developed in the rural, let's say, places. We're creating the how to videos in order for them to understand how to use the service. Should I play it like this?
Okay. I think you can't hear it. But we have added the lines in here. I'm not going to show the whole one.
(Captioned video playing)
>> LAMAN AKBAROVA: This is the communication we have created for ID. We have this kind of life event. One of them is digital ID that you don't need to have your ID on you. You can present your ID by QR code. In order to make it more massive, we have been 32 placements in digital screens, and scrollers. We have recording this, took this person as the main, let's say, for our key visual, because he is part of our population. He looks like a typical Azerbaijani to make it closer to our audience.
When it comes to services, we are also communicating the services. These are kind of the contents that we're showing where this person can use the digital ID and how they can use the digital ID. I will show them. I don't think you're going to have the sound because I turned it off. Here in this kind of content we're showing that people can come to airline. They can come to the pickup drop shipping. They can come to the railway station and use the digital ID instead of the physical one. So, there is no need to carry it around.
Also, the services that I mentioned before, so communal certificate, know tailor services, so everything communal services within our application that you can use without any physical presence at any other government body. So, we're communicating them as well. And for each of them we have separate content. As you can see as a key visual and also how the videos plus the PR coverage I mentioned before.
This is the kind of also how tos that we do with the in‑house team. These guys are working in marketing as well. We're post producting them ourselves to create more simple content for our citizens.
Also, as I said, it's very important to work with social media and influencers, super important. Because if you go to statistics, 86% of Azerbaijan population is watching TV. Even though the social media is here, 86% of people still watch TV. That's why we are on TV. And the rest, the young generation, let's say they're online. So, people my age they don't have the TV, the national TV set in their homes. They use YouTube, Netflix, and that's it. So, in order to tackle them as well and tackle them within the social media and of course through YouTube, et cetera, we have influencers. So, we're using someone with high engagement rates. They're doing this how to and very simple how to videos as well.
Here I'm going to have the TV, the main copy. But it's not to be with sound. It's in Azerbaijani. I'm going to skip it. I'll try to show the content we have for our TV and the banners we created. During some serious or during some shows on TV, we have a place for the banner in order to communicate mygov. This is how it goes. Here, again, we're communicating know tailor services and we're having the call to action for people to download it. Same goes for the general educating ID communication. Here the main idea of our TV it's very emotional. We're showing the use of our grandparents, how they used to have this documentation and piling them up and how many like difficulties they were going through. For example, this guy is trying to buy a car but he cannot because he left documentation at home. Then we were showing everyone now you don't have to have it. We have mygov which is simplifying your life. Mygov is closer to the government.
These are two life events that are also out. One is to be a parent, which you get their certificate of your newborn child through mygov. You can give the name of your child, register, and get their certificate at the point of physical office. And then also get married. In order to get married, now Azerbaijan population doesn't need to go anywhere. You write the code of your ID and the code of ID of the person you want to get married with, then they just give notification someone wants to marry you. You accept it. Then you have a physical wedding. You get your certificate, and everyone is happy. This is like super, super cool thing for Azerbaijan and super innovative thing that we have launched.
And also, other than this kind of cool features and content, we also have educative content. As I said, digital literacy as in Europe or maybe in some very developed countries, so this is part of our job as well in order to actually increase the digital literacy. And this kind of TV shows, we have low captions to them or long entries we're giving on social media is about (Audio breaking up).
Mygov is the first app in Azerbaijan that brings this feature to citizens. People can actually control what kind of data they're sharing with government and with the bankers. For example, I have a mortgage, right? I do. Bank asks for permission once. Then they can use my data as much as they want. For example, before mygov, I didn't know about that. Now I can access it, and I can actually stop them using my data. And they will have to call me again and ask for it if they need it.
So, in order to deliver this message ‑‑ because if you ask the general public, they would say, why do I need it? My data is government data. They can use it. In order to increase the importance of this, in order to explain why it's important, we have this separate kind of informative educational content we're sharing within the mygov platform.
These are the numbers for the last 25 days. I just wanted to show you how we're doing. It's not the final numbers or the final record. As you can see, YouTube, everything for young generation. This is digital marketing numbers. We brought bottom 35,000 downloads which is a super high number. We compared this to the funnel of other public sectors. This is a very high number. And we have high amount of impressions, which are going for 70% of them are organic right now, which is a great number. And YouTube views which is over the million.
Same goes for Meta adds, more than 8 million impressions, more than 30,000 clicks, and total views over 4 million. What we're trying to do in the next year and trying to actually update is our strategy within the YouTube, because they are a little short, a lot of TikTok stuff that we have not activated yet.
We believe that it will give us even more numbers that we're looking for and more exposure to the target audiences that we're working with. So that's the last slide of my presentation. I hope you enjoyed it. I would be happy to answer any of your questions. Follow us, please follow us on Instagram. I can share the page if you're interested. And I hope you will enjoy the next speaker. We're going to talk about (?) thank you very much. Thank you.
>> ILAHA BAGHIROVA: Thank you very much, Laman, the head of Azerbaijan center will talk about another part of the center. Thank you. Welcome.
>> Thank you, Ilaha. The clicker? Thank you for staying with us. Unfortunately, I don't have those kinds of videos, but I will try to explain what our agency does in terms of innovation. My colleagues have been talking about what we've been doing in the digital part which is basically building the products. I will slightly touch on what we do for the innovation and I will talk about Azerbaijan innovation center that we presently launched. So, starting the best practices around the world among the countries, it comes clear that in order to have a sustainable well-functioning innovative society, there are five main players that we have to foresee.
We identify them as following, which is the market access for the start‑ups and the companies, having access to funding, access to infrastructure, access to talent and culture.
I will go a little bit in details with each of these pillars and explain what we do for each of these pillars as the agency.
So obviously, we want to have the ecosystem functioning, you have to have some sort of access to the market for the startups, for the investors, for the foreign companies, IT companies to work with.
We have to create the ecosystem to emerging. In order to do so we work with lots of universities within the country, third‑party vendors. We do lots of programmes throughout not only the capital city but throughout other cities of the country. For the last two years out of this programme, we managed to get more than 600 unique ideas out of which we achieve to get to 165MVPs which is the minimum viable products for the startups. Out of that, obviously we go to the incubation and the acceleration programs for MVPs to grow further.
Once that happens, we kind try to have a match them with other investors and venture funds to get them to the next steps.
Parallel to that, we take our startups, it's not just about in the country and we go to international events. Last two years we have taken probably 18, close to 20 events globally, whether it's the Middle East, MENA region, Europe, Asia. We sponsor these events and we take our startups and IT companies and take them to international global markets so they can field the communications and collaborations and networking in order to grow their businesses.
Access to funding. So, when it comes to funding of the startups and ecosystem, it's a bit closed box for Azerbaijan as a society, because being part of the Soviet Union for 70 years and now trying to open up and modernise the economy and the system, it's not an easy task. So, the government took the first steps to initiate the venture funds establishment in Azerbaijan. The very first contact was to establish (Audio breaking up) ventures and another one with the fund. We emerging fund establishing which is currently around 35 million USD under management. The ecosystem is relatively known. We understand in the coming years it will grow more than 50 million. We have a few more success stories coming up. It will eventually grow further. We help invest our startups through these venture funds, not directly.
Access to talent, obviously once you have the market access, then you have the investment and the money in place, you need to have the people who will work in these companies and the startups. The dedication part, as my colleagues mentioned, we take it seriously as a ministry. So far, we have managed to give, provide scholarships to more than 9,000 students in the last two years. We are trying to create this pool of talents that can be accessible to foreign companies when they come to Azerbaijan to open their subsidiaries or use the tool as the outsource for their project.
Also, we have created the Azerbaijan cybersecurity to school which is graduating and the graduates start to work in the government entities and organisations that foresee cybersecurity issues or the processes in the country. And also support several schools which is an international franchise, peer to peer school that has probably two cohorts throughout the year and gives graduates to the ecosystem.
Culture. Culture is a big issue, I would say, for us. Because as I mentioned, as a former Soviet Union country when you talk about start‑up innovation, it's still ‑‑ a significant number of our community and our society, I don't want to say don't get it but probably doesn't have the necessary tools and understanding of what it should be.
So as an agency, we tried to change this culture. The resources we have, we make lots of events. We make community events, networking events. Last week we actually had the second awards which we select the main ecosystem players and start‑ups and for the nomination and we do this event. We kind of ‑‑ like Oscar events for our ecosystem which stimulate the companies and individuals to take part here.
Lots of meet‑ups. We do international PR as well to change that culture. Last pillar is obviously access to the infrastructure. So, when you have the market in place (Audio breaking up) then you have the talent pool, then you have to provide the necessary (Audio breaking up) for them to grow.
This is where I particularly participate mostly. So, our ministry does a broader scale of infrastructure support which is access to the networks, building the data centers and all these global scale projects. As an agency we deal with the physical space for start‑ups to come and operate. This is where I'm shifting to our ‑‑ the project that I mentioned which is the Azerbaijan innovation center. We call is (Speaking non‑English language) it standards for the center. We decided to keep it as AIM because it describes what we want to get achieved easily. So, this is the building we opened very recently. The first opening was the 2nd of October. What we try to achieve here is going to be a network of physical spaces. We don't want to limit it to just physical space. Yes, we are going to have the co‑working office spaces, meeting rooms, and several resources that are required for the startups and the companies and the mentors to come and sit and work together which you can see from the photos, the first space that we opened in Baku very recently. We are planning to open the second store ‑‑ not store, the branch, next week.
For the next year we're planning to do three more locations throughout the country. It's not just like innovation centers. There are also supporting R&D labs and centers in one of the universities this year or at the start of doing that. Next year we're sponsoring to financing to build our center within the University. It's going to be branded like powered by aim. It's not just innovation center. It's going to be different formats as well.
So, what we do here, it's not obviously, as we say, our goal is not to send the tables or the desks or meeting rooms to our residents. We want to become as the new epicenter of the ecosystem. And we have been open for two months and we have probably more than 35 events took place in our centers. And we do the meetups, the workshops, the trainings, the conferences. During CoP 29 we had two big events that took place in our centers where innovators, business people come together. They discuss. They do networking, and they do celebrations for the graduations. This is from the school cohort graduation. It's becoming a vibrant place which makes us very happy, the collaboration and networking is very important for the ecosystem growth.
Lastly, other than providing the physical space and doing all these events. We are also planning to build several projects within aim. The IT Park residency start‑up companies (Audio breaking up) mostly the IT park you have to be physically present there. But in our case, we have the virtual residency to our residents. You may have your own office in a different part of the global you still get the social taxes, the property taxes, the personal income tax. You get tax deduction on the dividends you make. So, all the benefits you may get on the physical park you can get virtually as well. We do soft landing programs dedicated to working on this. This is relatively new, by the way. We recently started doing that. Soft landing is going to work for foreign companies that want to come to Azerbaijan to get in the market. It's not just us per se Utah you can work with the region as well. You can have the access to the centralisation through our connections and government bodies.
Business support, we will provide technical or mentorship or any kind of busy support that our new established businesses or start‑ups that require ‑‑ we are also creating this excellent centers and different verticals. We're closely working with different industries in the country, whether it's the financial sector versus defense sector. Our goal is to kind of stimulate and grow the ecosystem around the specific verticals that are growing organically and are ready to support us along the road.
Obviously, we have the future plans. I'm not going to go into details on each of them. But as a country, as a state organisation, we want to stimulate this growth.
So, three years has been supporting. We deploy as an ecosystem enabler. We try to help the ecosystem so that it grows. We see it's not enough. The ecosystem is very young, very immature. We felt a necessity to step in and create another brand that will work with the ecosystem players, hand to hand to help the growth whether it's the startups or the IT companies, whether you put the country on the map in the regional progress, et cetera.
So, in the next two years probably we want to become stronger within the country, open our spaces. And then grow regionally and internationally.
I put my contacts in case. This is my WhatsApp number and telegram nobody as well. Feel free to contact me. I'll be more than happy to help you guys. Thank you for your attention.
>> ILAHA BAGHIROVA: Yes, he's right. We are done. But if you have any questions before then, please welcome to ask your question.