The FBRK editorial team continues to analyse the largest government procurement contracts of Kazakh ministries in 2024. This time, the focus is on the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection of the Population, whose expenditures appear surprisingly modest, especially in comparison with the budgets of other ministries. However, behind this apparent restraint lies a vast effort to provide social support for millions of citizens.
The ministry's main mission is to create an effective social protection system that guarantees stability and support for the most vulnerable segments of the population.
Topping the list of the largest government procurement contracts for 2024 is a contract for services to ensure the payment of social benefits and pensions, worth nearly 20 billion tenge. The contractor was NJSC ‘State Corporation ‘Government for Citizens’. According to the submitted documentation, these funds were intended to cover a colossal amount of work: from compiling files on recipients of various payments to organising the pension and social payments themselves. This concerns tens of thousands of people to whom the state guarantees social support.
It is worth noting that this year in Kazakhstan, the government planned to increase pensions and social payments, allocating over 6 trillion tenge for these purposes. However, as early as February of this year, the Prosecutor's Office of Kostanay Region identified violations of the rights of education workers amounting to more than 223 million tenge. Teachers were not paid compensation upon retirement or travel expenses.
An equally important area was information security and access control in the social and labour sphere – a procurement contract worth nearly 1.6 billion tenge. The ministry invested in the development of complex automated systems, from electronic pension allocation to labour market monitoring. In other words, this money went towards ensuring the security of computer programmes that handle pension allocation, unemployment registration, and other social matters. Interestingly, how effectively are these costly technological solutions being used today?
The next significant block of procurement contracts is information and analytical support for the labour market. Nearly 370 million tenge was allocated for a comprehensive study of labour resources: from assessing the current situation to forecasting staffing needs and developing professional skills.
Furthermore, in 2024, the ministry invested in methodological support for the national qualifications system (developing rules and requirements for various professions), which cost the budget 158 million tenge.
Particular attention was paid to technical support for data processing centres (DPCs) in major cities, specifically in Karaganda and Astana. Nearly 125 million tenge per centre ensured the uninterrupted operation of critical social sector infrastructure.
Analysing these procurement contracts makes it clear: the Ministry of Labour is not merely an administrative body, but a complex mechanism of social protection. There is a clear technologisation of the social sphere – a significant portion of the budget is directed towards information systems, databases, and analytical research. On the one hand, this indicates a desire to modernise social processes; on the other, it raises the question of the correlation between costs and the real effectiveness of the implemented solutions.
At the same time, the structure of the procurement contracts demonstrates a comprehensive approach to managing the social sphere: from technical infrastructure to methodological support for professional standards. However, the fundamental problem remains the gap between large-scale financial investments and concrete improvements in people's lives. Labour market research, the development of professional standards, and the automation of social processes require not only substantial financial investment, but also qualitative substantive changes.
For context, in a previous article, the FBRK editorial team analysed the government procurement contracts of the Ministry of Transport, which allocates significant funds for maintaining its headquarters, providing transport services with official vehicles, and technical support.