While Kyrgyzstan promised to improve accessibility for disabled citizens when it ratified the UN disability rights convention in 2019, it has largely failed to deliver on this promise thus far. To change this, young people with disabilities are now gathering what that promise has always lacked: proof.
In the capital, Bishkek, if a person with a disability were to make a complaint about an inaccessible pharmacy, they could go to the government building with newly installed ramps. But how would they get there?
Buses lack ramps for wheelchair users, intersections do not have tactile paving for people with visual impairments, and help buttons are nonexistent. Without someone assisting them at every step, people with disabilities face barriers in navigating public life.
For 218,000 people with disabilities registered in Kyrgyzstan — about three percent of the population, according to the Ministry of Labor, Social Protection, and Migration — the city and the rest of the country are not accessible.
The biggest problem isn’t just the country’s inaccessibility, but that it isn’t recorded anywhere — so it can’t be proven, and if it can’t be proven, it can be ignored.
That’s what Oasis Data Lab is trying to fix by mapping what’s actually there, with the people who already know every inaccessible entrance by heart.
A commitment and a gap
When Kyrgyzstan ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) on March 14, 2019, it joined a legal framework that obligates accessible infrastructure, inclusive planning, and meaningful participation for people with disabilities.
The commitment was real. What followed was harder.
A UNICEF analysis found that implementation mechanisms had not yet been put in place, and that people with disabilities had not felt the ratification’s impact on their daily lives. Researchers studying disability rights in Central Asia have noted that ratification and recognition are not the same thing. Closing the gap between them requires sustained, documented work.
Existing data shows how wide that gap remains. In 2020, the UN Development Program and the Association of Parents of Children with Disabilities assessed public buildings in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s capital, and found that only 25 percent had accessibility ramps.
Gulmira Kazakunova, a disability rights advocate quoted in the study, observed that accessibility in Kyrgyzstan had been reduced to the ramp at the entrance — one element standing in for the whole spectrum of what people with disabilities actually need.
That study is six years old. It covered a limited sample and was never developed into a living, publicly accessible record. The result is a structural problem that affects everything downstream. Without a verified baseline of where barriers exist, it is difficult to prioritize interventions, allocate resources, or measure whether anything is improving.
In most systems, policy follows evidence. Where evidence is thin, progress tends to be too. What is not measured is, at best, harder to address — and at worst, easy to overlook.
Mapping the city realities
Oasis Foundation has spent over 20 years in Kyrgyzstan implementing projects on the protection of vulnerable youth, specifically those who are left behind by the system.
In 2024, they started something with a deliberately simple premise: Before anyone can fix Bishkek’s accessibility issues, someone has to document it. And the people doing the documenting should be the ones who live it.
Oasis Data Lab is developing a mobile application that puts data collection directly in the hands of participants. Young people with disabilities and social activists from Bishkek and its surrounding settlements are using it to assess public buildings, entrances, ramps, bathrooms, signage, and submit geo-tagged photos and standardized accessibility indicators as they go.
Each submission becomes a point on what will be Bishkek’s first public digital accessibility map.
The mapping is only part of it. Alongside it, Oasis Data Lab is running a series of three workshops and a policy hackathon on digital advocacy, disability rights, and storytelling, connecting over 30 people with disabilities, social activists, and urban planning experts. When the findings reach decision-makers, the people presenting them should be the same ones who walked the streets collecting them.
The data is theirs for a reason
The disability rights movement has a founding principle: Nothing about us without us. It usually gets applied to policymaking. This project applies it one level deeper, to the evidence that policymaking runs on.
The distinction matters more than one might think. An external auditor with a checklist can record that a ramp exists in front of a building. They will not record that its incline is impossible to climb without help, that it ices over in the winter, or that it leads to a door too heavy to open from a wheelchair. On a checklist, the building is accessible.
In reality, it is not. That is why data on people’s lived experiences is crucial to building a truly accessible city.
It’s also what makes this an exercise in digital democracy rather than charity. A public map of verified, geo-tagged information is a form of civic participation that is hard to dismiss and harder to dispute. It shifts the conversation with authorities from complaint to evidence, and shifts the people gathering it from policy beneficiaries to policy authors.
Data, used this way, is civic power.
The findings will feed the Inclusive Infrastructure Index, a public dashboard scoring the accessibility of assessed buildings, which will be presented to Bishkek’s Mayoral Office and the Ministry of Labor, Social Protection, and Migration, which is responsible for reporting on CRPD implementation to the UN.
What gets built when people with disabilities lead
The Oasis Foundation has already assessed 350 buildings and is working to analyze the data. By September 2026, we expect to produce two policy briefs from citizen-generated data and hold a policy hackathon that brings participants, legal experts, and urban planners into the same room.
The map carries on after that — participants will keep updating it, and the model can be applied elsewhere: Other cities, other rights, wherever the same gap between commitment and reality exists.
Mapping the city will not build the ramps. What it does is record the gaps publicly, permanently, and in a format that is hard to dismiss. Kyrgyzstan has had the legal commitment since 2019. For seven years, the evidence to back it up has been missing.
Thirty young people with disabilities are building it now, one assessed building at a time. By the time this project ends, “we didn’t know” stops being an excuse.
