Kazakhstan Opinions - The Times Of Central Asia

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CAMCA

Opinion: CAMCA: From Regional Connectivity to Cross-Border Innovation

What would it take for a fintech company that succeeds in one CAMCA country to enter another without starting from zero? That question guided a roundtable on the next digital Silk Road at the CAMCA Regional Forum in Baku. The discussion brought together leaders in financial services, investment, and technology from a region spanning Central Asia, the Caucasus, Mongolia, and Afghanistan. As moderator, I wanted to move beyond the broad ambition of regional connectivity and examine what companies need to operate across borders: working payment systems, partnerships, regulatory clarity, and a path to their first customer in a new market. The panel featured Tughra Musayeva, Head of Innovations at PASHA Financial Holding; Jenny Jenish kyzy, Product Owner at MBank Junior and a CAMCA Network member from Kyrgyzstan; Muna Shukurova, Managing Director of Alif in Uzbekistan and a CAMCA Network member from Tajikistan; and Jonathan Low, Founder and Group CEO of Ampyre Group and Biptap. A central theme was financial infrastructure. The speakers explored the potential for pilots using existing platforms to connect CAMCA markets, including cross-border payments, business settlements, digital wallets, and new settlement technologies. Such pilots would require regulators and private companies to work together on defined problems and learn from results. Mr. Low argued that the region has an opportunity to make deliberate choices about the systems it wants to build: “Most regions overregulate before they even know what they're building. CAMCA has an advantage here, it can watch Europe's and ASEAN’s fintech buildout and skip the mistakes instead of repeating them and learn what works. But that only works if you decide what you want first. Regulation should follow the vision, not replace it. And the tool that actually unifies a region this spread out is banking orchestration, new technology stitching fragmented markets into one functioning system.” Expansion also raises a practical question for companies already active in more than one market: which capabilities can travel, and which parts of a product must change? Requirements for licensing, identity checks, anti-money-laundering controls, infrastructure, and consumer behavior differ across countries. Ms Shukurova drew on Alif’s experience of entering other CAMCA markets: “Regional expansion is not a copy-paste exercise. You can replicate technology, risk expertise and operating capabilities, but the product still has to be built around local regulation, infrastructure and customer behavior. The core can travel; the market fit has to be local.” The panel then turned to the role of established financial groups. For a startup, a successful pilot can demonstrate that a solution works. It becomes more valuable when that result helps the company find a partner or customer in its next market. Corporate networks and regional investors can help make that step less costly. Ms Musayeva described the gap between proving a product and expanding it: “In our region, a startup does not scale simply because its technology is scalable. It scales when the ecosystem reduces the cost of entering the next market. Today, a founder who has proven a solution in Tashkent still arrives in...

CAMCA

Opinion: Central Asia’s Wider Future: The CAMCA Network Brings Regional Cooperation to Baku

Central Asia is helping shape a wider regional agenda, one that connects trade and investment with technology, education, and security. In Baku, the CAMCA Regional Forum is bringing together the people who can carry that agenda forward, with the CAMCA Network helping turn shared interests into opportunities for cooperation. Taking place on October 1–2 at the Fairmont Baku Flame Towers, the 2026 CAMCA Regional Forum convenes policymakers, business leaders, investors, educators, researchers, and entrepreneurs under the theme “The World and CAMCA: A Region at the Crossroads.” Its central question is how regional cooperation can expand economic opportunities and strengthen the capacity of countries and communities to shape their future. The CAMCA Network helps shape this conversation. As a co-founder and co-organizer of the forum, it connects professionals across Central Asia, Mongolia, the Caucasus, and Afghanistan. Its members contribute expertise, lead discussions, and bring the experience of working in the region into the program. They also give the forum continuity: relationships strengthened in Baku can support collaboration long after the gathering concludes. For Central Asia, that wider community matters. The five countries have distinct economic structures, resources, and international relationships. Cooperation must reflect those differences while identifying where shared effort can expand their choices. Connections with the Caucasus, Mongolia, and Afghanistan offer different opportunities and challenges, each deserving a place in the regional conversation. The CAMCA Regional Forum’s discussions of global shifts through 2030 and greater Central Asia–Caucasus convergence address this strategic landscape. “From C5 to a Wider Framework” asks how a broader geography of cooperation might serve the region’s interests. The underlying issue is the ability of countries to shape their own decisions: how working with neighbors can strengthen their options in a changing international environment. Economic connectivity provides a concrete test. Routes across the Caspian and through the Caucasus can help Central Asian countries reach additional markets and partners. Their value depends on dependable transport, workable procedures, and institutions able to coordinate across borders. Businesses need enough certainty to invest, plan, and build lasting commercial relationships. Today’s discussion on connecting CAMCA to the world brings these questions together. For Central Asia, the opportunity extends beyond moving goods through the region. Better connections can support production, logistics, services, and investment within it. The strategic objective is to create more value locally and give regional enterprises a stronger place in wider markets. The forum’s paired sessions on public policy and the private sector approach that objective from complementary directions. Governments influence the conditions under which companies operate. Businesses decide where to commit capital, develop products, and employ people. Bringing these perspectives together helps clarify which barriers require public action and where commercial initiative can move cooperation forward. Technology adds another dimension. The discussion of artificial intelligence asks where CAMCA fits in a rapidly changing global economy. The Digital Silk Road roundtable connects that question with financial services and innovation. For entrepreneurs in Central Asia, digital connections can open access to customers, payments, financing, and partners across borders. The investment and entrepreneurship...

Central Asia-U.S. Relations

Opinion: Central Asia Is More Than Minerals

For years, Central Asia was one of those regions that Washington periodically rediscovered and then forgot. Officials visited and announced new initiatives, but the relationship hardly changed. That is no longer the case. Many pundits see the current surge of American interest in Central Asia through the lens of transactional foreign policy: nowadays the focus has been on critical minerals, supply-chain security, and competition with China. Valid so far as it goes, this approach misses the larger story. Central Asia is not suddenly important because of its minerals or because Washington has decided that it is. Increasingly, Washington must pay attention to Central Asia because the region itself is changing, and in largely positive directions. Over three decades, American investors largely dismissed the region as too poorly governed and too distant. Now the region itself is working to change the conditions that made it unattractive. The transformation is far from complete, but it is real. When the Central Asian states emerged from the Soviet Union in 1991, they faced grave disadvantages. State enterprises dominated their economies, and they fell short of Western investors’ expectations in both the rule of law and transparency. While such problems have not disappeared, they are everywhere being worked on. Uzbekistan provides the clearest example. Since 2017, Tashkent has undertaken reforms to liberalize its economy and improve the environment for private investment. The World Bank now describes Uzbekistan as one of the world's top reformers. Kazakhstan has also built more sophisticated financial and regulatory institutions. Its goal is to position itself as a regional hub for logistics, energy, and finance. The World Bank's new 2026–31 country strategy emphasizes a "business-ready Kazakhstan," with greater private-sector participation, improved infrastructure, and better natural-resource management. The pace of change in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan has been slower, for understandable reasons. Kyrgyzstan’s early political reforms long left the government rudderless, Tajikistan endured a five-year civil war, and Turkmenistan was stymied by Russia’s total control of its gas industry. Now these countries, too, are belatedly advancing. Central Asia has not become Switzerland. Corruption, political interference, and governance problems still afflict the countries’ economies, and the OECD continues to identify these as important obstacles to investment. The question is not whether Central Asia has solved these problems but whether it has changed enough to become investable. The answer increasingly is yes, it has. Moscow's offensive in Ukraine accelerated changes Washington had sought for decades. Secondary sanctions compelled Central Asians to develop new commercial avenues not subject to international restrictions. While Central Asian governments maintain important relations with Russia, they all seek pragmatic alternatives that reduce their former reliance on Moscow. The countries are expanding regional cooperation while reaching across the Caspian to the South Caucasus and beyond. The resulting Middle Corridor promises direct access to global markets. The measure of its success will be whether Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan gain trans-Caspian pipelines to transport their resources directly to Europe. In short, Central Asia is doing what Washington has long wanted it to do: become more...

AI Education

Opinion: Kazakhstan Is Betting on AI to Close Its Rural Education Gap. Is the Infrastructure Ready?

PISA 2022 exposed a persistent divide between Kazakhstan’s urban and rural schools. Students in rural schools trailed their urban counterparts by 18 points in mathematical literacy and 26 points in science. The gaps had narrowed since 2018, but they remained substantial. Kazakhstan is now betting that artificial intelligence can help narrow them further. On September 1, the government launched a pilot project in ten small rural schools in the Pavlodar and Kyzylorda regions. More than 50 fourth-grade students are taking part. The project is expected to expand in stages to about 2,600 small rural schools by July 2028. The potential is considerable. Students in remote communities can gain access to stronger teaching, more varied educational material, and learning tools that respond to their individual needs. But AI will not close Kazakhstan’s rural education gap by itself. Its success will depend on something less glamorous: reliable infrastructure and teachers who are properly prepared to use it. What AI Can Do, and What Distance Learning Does President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has argued that digital technology can help reduce differences in educational opportunity between cities and the regions. In his 2025 State of the Nation Address, he called for a small-school model based on distance learning and AI that would give rural students access to high-quality educational materials. The distinction between those two elements is important. In the current Qazaq Digital Mektebi model, experienced teachers in Astana deliver live online lessons from a specially equipped studio, while local teachers remain in the classroom to support students. That is distance learning. The AI layer has a different role: it analyzes students’ responses, identifies gaps in their knowledge, and helps teachers determine who needs additional support. This combination could be particularly valuable in small rural schools. Kazakhstan has about 2,600 such schools, and some classes have only five or six students. Recruiting an experienced specialist for every subject is difficult in many remote communities. Online teaching can widen access to expertise, while AI can help make that teaching more responsive to individual students. Used well, AI can assess a student’s pace, identify areas of weakness, and adjust exercises to an appropriate level. That could help move schools away from a uniform approach in which every student receives the same material regardless of progress. It can also give local teachers more information about where additional attention is needed. But this should not be confused with replacing teachers. The most promising feature of the pilot is precisely that it combines technology with human instruction. AI can process patterns in student performance, but teachers still have to interpret those signals, understand the child, and decide how to respond. Infrastructure Comes Before Ambition That model depends on infrastructure that cannot be taken for granted. Around 67% of Kazakhstan’s schools are in rural areas, and roughly half of those are classified as small-enrollment schools. Digital education therefore has to work across a large and geographically dispersed network. Internet access has improved significantly, but connection quality remains uneven. In August 2025, Prime...

Nature Investment

Opinion: Financing Nature: Why Biodiversity Investment Matters for Central Asia

Just imagine: only 50 years ago, wildlife was far more abundant across many of the world’s forests, grasslands, rivers, and seas. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature’s Living Planet Report 2024, the average size of monitored vertebrate populations fell by 73% between 1970 and 2020, based on data from almost 35,000 populations worldwide. That extraordinary decline has taken place within a single human lifetime. We are used to treating this as an environmental statistic, a sad fact trotted out in a nature documentary to which we have little emotional connection. Seen this way, we miss a vital truth: food, agriculture, construction, and forestry all depend immensely on natural systems. Pollination, water filtration, soil fertility, and flood control are among the functions that biodiversity provides for us. When that infrastructure fails, the economy built on top of it becomes more expensive, then less reliable, and eventually, in some places, unworkable. Emergency Room Most of what passes for environmental action today is triage. A river floods a city that paved over its wetlands, and engineers are called in to build higher walls. A heat wave kills crops, and governments subsidize irrigation for farmland that used to be forest. A fishery collapses, and the response is a moratorium, arriving years after the fish are already gone. This is the pattern across almost every domain of environmental policy: we manage consequences with enormous expense, and we manage causes almost as an afterthought. It is also the least efficient way to run a planet. Treating a symptom after it has metastasized costs orders of magnitude more than preventing it, financially as much as ecologically. Some of this triage is now unavoidable. The carbon already in the atmosphere will continue influencing the climate for years regardless of what we do next, while a great deal of the damage caused by air pollution is already locked in and can only be managed, not undone. These are debts we are stuck repaying. Biodiversity is often different because it is still substantially in our hands. A species pushed to the edge can, with sustained effort, be pulled back from it. A degraded watershed can, over a generation, recover its function. In Kazakhstan, recent estimates place the snow leopard population at between 152 and 189 animals, close to levels last recorded in the 1980s. The recovery has been associated with sustained monitoring and habitat protection. It demonstrates that when species and ecosystems are effectively managed and adequately protected, conservation measures can deliver tangible results by maintaining biodiversity and helping threatened species recover. That kind of recovery is rare in climate policy. This disconnect risks creating dangerous trade-offs. We cannot decarbonize an economy while continuing to bulldoze the ecosystems around it. An electric vehicle removes tailpipe emissions from a city street, and that is real progress. But it also requires critical minerals such as lithium, copper, nickel, and cobalt, whose extraction can carry substantial environmental costs. None of this is a criticism of electric vehicles. It is a reminder...

Secularism

Kazakhstan Hijab Debate Exposes Divide Over Secularism

Kazakhstan’s long-running controversy over hijabs in schools has collided with a wider public argument about religion, exposing sharp differences among prominent public figures and institutions over the boundaries of the country’s secular model. The latest religious controversy in Kazakhstan’s social media space was triggered by two statements made within the span of a week. On September 3, well-known Kazakhstani film and entertainment producer and former television host Bayan Alaguzova wrote on Threads that she was “tired of religion and its propaganda.” “I’ll say this right away,” she added. “There’s no need to frighten me with hell – it doesn’t exist for me. Not a single person in the world can claim to have seen hell, or heaven for that matter. Now that is reliable information! The same goes for the 72 virgins thrown into the bargain.” She went on to sarcastically ask how a disembodied spirit was supposed to deprive the heavenly maidens of their virginity. The deliberately provocative tone used by the prominent film and entertainment figure stirred debate among social media users. Soon afterward, another Threads user posted a screenshot of an official complaint submitted through Kazakhstan’s eOtinish system against the producer, calling for Alaguzova’s posts to be examined for possible incitement of religious discord. There have so far been no official reports of further action on the complaint. Even so, Kazakhstanis on social media began joking about how the complainant intended to prove the existence of heaven and hell. Journalists and other users also spoke out in support of Alaguzova. On September 8, in response to the backlash, Alaguzova acknowledged on Instagram that her “words had hurt believers” and offered her “sincere apologies,” explaining that she respected “every person and every faith, as long as it does not harm others.” She then said her remarks had been misunderstood. “All those accusing me of ‘offending the feelings of believers,’ read carefully: I said that I am against the imposition of dogmas alien to our people, against radical and fanatical propaganda, not religion itself... Do you want girls to be married off at the age of nine? To be denied education or medical care? To be beaten supposedly ‘as a preventive measure against the influence of shaitan’? To be taken as wives without anyone assuming responsibility for them? To be easily abandoned simply by loudly saying ‘talaq’ three times? Do you want your daughter or sister not to be an individual in her own right, but simply an appendage to someone else? To be unable to appear in public or speak without permission? To be unable even to protect herself and her children? I am categorically against this!” the producer said. That same day, journalists at a government briefing asked Kazakhstan’s Education Minister Zhuldyz Suleimenova about reports that some private schools had allowed pupils to wear hijabs. Each new school year in Kazakhstan has brought renewed disputes over hijabs in schools. Some Muslim parents, particularly in western Kazakhstan, require their teenage daughters to wear hijabs to school. This conflicts...