Billions of tenge, dozens of contracts, and one question: what is the Ministry of Health of Kazakhstan spending its money on? The editorial team of FBRK analysed the most expensive government procurements of the department in 2024, and the results proved to be highly revealing.
The lion's share of the Ministry of Health's budget goes towards medical workforce training. The training of specialists at Astana Medical University alone cost the budget nearly 6.7 billion tenge – this is the absolute record holder among the department's procurements. In second place is a contract with Kazakh National Medical University named after S.D. Asfendiyarov for an amount exceeding 4.2 billion tenge.
If you add up all the expenses on training medical specialists at various levels, you get an astronomical sum – around 35 billion tenge. Moreover, the money goes towards training both reserve officers and specialists with higher and postgraduate education. The geographical coverage is impressive: Astana, Almaty, Karaganda, Semey, western Kazakhstan, and the southern regions.
The construction of the National Scientific Oncology Centre in Astana deserves special attention. The total cost of this grandiose project amounted to over 145 billion tenge, of which 16.2 billion was allocated for 2024 alone. Plus, more than 103 million for engineering services and technical supervision. Interestingly, the financing of the construction, which started back in 2019, is distributed in the contract all the way to 2025.
Considerable funds are also allocated for the functioning of the health insurance system. Two large contracts for services related to accounting and transfer of employer contributions and payments to the Social Health Insurance Fund total over 1 billion tenge (to be precise, 640.5 million and 416.8 million tenge). Under these contracts, the processing and transfer of contributions, the return of overpaid amounts to payers, and other financial operations ensuring the operation of the health insurance system are carried out.
If you look at the structure of expenditure, the ministry's priority becomes obvious – personnel. The majority of the budget goes towards training specialists of various levels and disciplines. On the one hand, this is logical – without qualified doctors, the healthcare system cannot function. On the other hand, the sums are impressive even by the standards of a government department.
It is interesting to compare this data with the previously analysed procurements of the Ministry of Labour, where the main funds went towards information systems, databases, and analytical research. The Ministry of Health, it seems, is betting on people, rather than on digitalisation.
The construction of the oncology centre is another priority, which is unsurprising given the importance of the fight against cancer and the need for modern infrastructure for diagnosis and treatment. However, the scale of funding and the drawn-out timelines of the project implementation raise questions about the efficiency of spending.
The picture of the Ministry of Health's government procurements resembles a layer cake, where each layer is a separate area of expenditure. The base of the cake is workforce training, on top are infrastructure projects, and in between is a layer of spending on insurance and ensuring the system's operation. And although the areas of expenditure themselves look logical, the scale of funding for some of them raises questions, the answers to which may only appear in the future.
The editorial team of FBRK will continue to analyse the largest government procurements of Kazakhstani departments in 2024. In our next article, we will look at the expenditure of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education.