Lessons on piercing the glass ceiling MONEY & MARKETS EXTRA
Bolor-erdene Battsengel gained fame as one of the youngest members of Mongolia’s government. In her two-and-a-half years as the chair of the country’s communication and information technology authority, she worked on digitizing the country’s government services so people in remote areas don’t have to spend long days traveling and waiting in lines for access to things like passport renewals or filing taxes.
Today, Battsengel (now 30) is completing a policy fellowship at Oxford University and runs Girls Code, which teaches girls from disadvantaged communities and nomadic families to code.
Why was this digitization project so important?
Mongolia is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. We have nomadic communities living in the countryside. Unlike the people in the cities, nomads would have to drive 5-10 hours just to get to their government facility.
And then they would, you know, have to stay there for a week to wait for the passport or come back. So now it’s very convenient. And one of the things I love about Mongolia is that now you can see a herder on a horse in the middle of nowhere, using e-mongolia and registering a company or getting an ID card or looking at their social security etc.
What is internet access like in Mongolia? We have 330 small villages and towns in Mongolia. It’s a very big country for 3.2 million people and the most important thing I worked on was digital inclusion — I wanted to reach out to people who do not have regular access to the internet. Those are the communities who need to be connected, to be well-informed. So now we have internet in all 330 small villages and towns in Mongolia. And it’s relatively free, we haven’t banned any website or social media or anything like that. So actually the statistics on our spending on social media is quite high.
Why did you leave your government post?
My vision always has been to transform Mongolia to a digital nation, because Mongolia is a very mining dependent economy. I genuinely still believe that digital technology will give us a second chance and it will be the second economic sector in Mongolia.
When I worked in government, it was typical that I would get a question asking me like, “Oh, whose assistant are you?” Or like, “Are you here to work as a waitress?” Whenever you see a young woman, it’s the stereotype. And even from the public, it’s an unusual image. And then I got a lot of cyberbullying from old male politicians because they would see me as a competitor. But I also got a lot of young supporters as well. So by the time I resigned, I needed to be able to fight against the system. But me being in the system, it was almost impossible to fight. I wanted to resign and then bring young people together, especially women together, and also tell them realistically what it is like to be in government as a young woman.