Kyrgyzstan joins Open Ownership’s pilot programme

We’re delighted to announce that Kyrgyzstan is the latest country to join Open Ownership’s pilot programme. Through this programme, Open Ownership will support the government of Kyrgyzstan in collecting and publishing high quality, open access beneficial ownership data for applicants and holders of oil, gas and mining licenses. The resulting data will be automatically available on the Open Ownership Register, and linked to other beneficial ownership data from around the world.

Open Ownership has worked closely with the Extractives Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI) to develop this partnership with Kyrgyzstan. A successful pilot programme will result in Kyrgyzstan implementing its commitment to EITI to have in place a publicly accessible register of the beneficial owners of companies holding mining licenses by 2020.

Mining accounts for nearly 9% of Kyrgyzstan’s GDP, with gold the biggest contributor. The country was one of the first to commit to increasing transparency in this sector, signing up to the EITI in 2004. Since then, Kyrgyzstan has worked with EITI to make significant progress towards greater transparency, and in 2018 passed a new Subsoil Law that requires beneficial ownership information for applicants and mining license holders.

According to EITI, there are only two other countries - UK and Ukraine - that disclose beneficial ownership through open and accessible registers. By participating in the Open Ownership pilot programme, Kyrgyzstan will become pioneers in providing EITI beneficial ownership as open data in a form that can be linked globally, based on Open Ownership’s data standard. Through this work, Open Ownership will identify learnings that can apply across other EITI countries working to meet beneficial ownership commitments, and integrate these into our implementation guidance for governments.

Thank you to our partners at the EITI International Secretariat and the Kyrgyzstan EITI Secretariat for their work so far towards making this partnership possible. We look forward to continuing our work with EITI and working with the Kyrgyzstan State Committee and technical implementers over the coming months.

To learn more about the Open Ownership pilot programme and the benefits to your country or organisation, contact Louise at [email protected].