PM: Belarus’ strategic task is to achieve real technological sovereignty under sanctions
Under the conditions of sanctions, the country’s strategic task is to achieve real technological sovereignty – as stated by Prime Minister Roman Golovchenko at today’s meeting of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers, which focused on the effectiveness of the use of innovative funds in 2023
The Prime Minister noted that this is not his first consideration of this issue. He was addressed twice (in April and October last year), and this attention has grounds. “Under the conditions of sanctions, our target and strategic task is to achieve real technological sovereignty. The republican centralised, local innovation funds and mechanisms for their use are among the tools for solving these problems by creating new high-tech industries and introducing advanced import-substituting technologies,” Mr. Golovchenko said. He added that a number of decisions had been made to increase the efficiency of using these financial instruments.
“I can assert that we have already achieved certain results. For example, the republican centralised innovation fund is being mastered at a level of more than 95 percent for the second year in a row. As regards local innovations funds, we also observe a positive trend in terms of their mastering. Some regions have worked well in innovative areas of the use: Minsk, Grodno, and Brest. Mastering has reached almost 100 percent there, without taking into account the costs of digitalisation. Although insufficient, the results are not the worst in the Vitebsk and Grodno regions, as well as in the city of Minsk. The level of the use of money from the relevant innovation funds was about 90 percent. The Mogilev Region coped a little worse than others, and the Chairman of the Mogilev Regional Executive Committee will report on the reasons for this state of affairs,” Mr. Golovchenko said.
At the same time, the Prime Minister stressed that the above-mentioned mastering of local innovation funds concerns spending in areas related to innovation and import substitution. “Actually, we have a major problematic issue: the financing of activities in the field of digital development. The overall level of use of funds from local innovation funds, taking into account the costs of digitalisation, is about 75 percent. That is, a quarter of the volume of funds has been excluded from economic turnover, of which more than 94m Roubles in terms of digitalisation. I would ask the Minister of Communications to report on the situation and measures taken to implement the plans in the field of digitalisation, taking into account the funds allocated for this purpose. If someone had or still has thoughts that we will not rush but will suddenly ask all the funds used to be directed to other purposes, then I can state that you are mistaken. There are strategic objectives to achieve technological sovereignty, especially in terms of digitalisation, the creation of domestic software and management systems. This is a matter of strategic development of our industry,” Mr. Golovchenko stated.
