Turkmenistan
Nine years of blogging later…
I started this blog back in September 2011 after completing my Master’s degree and having had the chance to write my final report about a subject you all now know I hold dear: higher education in Central Asia.
To begin with, the blog served partly as a personal library, a place to store interesting stories about education, society and politics in Central Asia (and sometimes other parts of the ex-Soviet space) and to monitor developments in the region.
Over time, I started to add my own analysis to stories I read about elsewhere, sometimes bringing together multiple sources to create a blog post. I also decided to provide translations or summaries of Russian language stories for an English reading audience.
In nearly a decade of running the blog, I’ve published 325 posts (around three a month) and there have been over 60,000 views and over 32,000 visitors to the site. The blog has nearly 2,000 followers. Not bad at all for a site that has a very specific focus and which I started out of personal curiosity!
Writing for the blog has been a vehicle for turning my personal interest in higher education and in the former Soviet space into a career choice. As you may know, I moved to Canada in 2015 to start a PhD on – you guessed it – higher education in Central Asia. Alongside my doctoral studies, I’ve had the opportunity to engage in academic and policy research on a wide range of higher education related issues as I sought to shift from a career in university administration to one more focussed on research and teaching.
On September 1, 2020 – the Day of Knowledge in many ex-Soviet countries – I successfully defended my PhD and am now looking forward to what lies ahead. I’ll be giving a public webinar about my thesis research on October 1 through the Centre for Global Higher Education. I warmly invite you to join. Here’s the link: https://www.researchcghe.org/events/cghe-seminar/surviving-a-crisis-resilience-adaptation-and-transformation-in-higher-education-after-the-collapse-of-the-soviet-union/.
I plan to keep blogging about Central Asian education, and hope you will keep reading. Let’s see where the next nine years takes us!
Making it easier for international students to work in Russia
Good news for international students in Russia: updated regulations that came into force earlier in August 2020 make it easier for them to work whilst they are studying.
Previously, international students had to obtain what one Uzbek student calls “an enormous pile of documents” before seeking term-time employment, which was enough to deter that student from looking for a part-time job.
With the change to the law, international students may now look for work during term time with just written confirmation from their university or college that they are a registered student. Neither they nor the employer needs to seek special permission or undertake a large paperwork exercise, and there are no limits on how many hours a week can be worked (as long as the work doesn’t place during a scheduled class). This mirrors the regulations already in place for breaks between semesters.
The thinking behind this policy change is to encourage students who need or want to find work to look for a job that’s more related to the area they are studying. More importantly, this move aims to reduce the cash (i.e. illegal) jobs that everyone knows students are doing.
This is hopefully a win-win for everyone. And what’s not to like about a regulation that reduces, rather than increases, red tape?
Russia’s international students
According to UNESCO, there are 250,658 international students in Russia. This means that just under 5% of the total student population is international – which may not sound much, but it’s on a par with the USA. The top sending countries to Russia are, unsurprisingly, from the former Soviet space with Central Asian countries leading the way: Kazakhstan (65,237 students), Uzbekistan (20,862), Turkmenistan (17,457), Ukraine (15,263), Tajikistan (14,204) and China turning up next with 11,950 students.
Here’s an infographic from RFE/RL showing the growth in international student numbers in Russia in recent years:
Back to school in Central Asia
The impending start of the 2020/21 school year is presenting challenges for teachers, students, parents, and governments around the world. Although some countries have managed to come up with a plan, many are still fumbling in the COVID-19 induced darkness, even with September just around the corner. Here’s a round up of where things stand in Central Asia (with updates as applicable after this was originally posted):
Kazakhstan is one of the countries with a clearly laid out plan of action, which was published in July (so organized!) and which I discussed in an earlier post.
Kyrgyzstan announced on August 18 that universities and colleges would begin the academic year online. There are no plans yet to return to face-to-face learning, which is not surprising given the very difficult time the country is currently having in managing COVID-19. Schools will also be online with the exception of first graders, who will study in person.
Tajikistan has finally admitted that COVID-19 exists, but this has had little impact on regular activities. However, schools did finish the previous school year early (in April) and as a result started back on August 17 – ahead of the traditional September 1 timeline. The additional two weeks will be an adaptation period, according to the Minister of Education, not least to catch up on the time lost because there was no switch to remote learning.
Students will have to follow fairly strict measures such as maintaining physical distancing in the school yard, wearing a mask, and regularly washing hands. As far as possible, lessons are to take place outdoors or in larger indoor spaces to help teachers keep a 2m distance from students and to ensure the minimum 1m space between students.
The August 5 directive from the Ministry regarding the return to school also mentions enhancements to cleaning and sanitary measures, although is silent on how this will be funded and who will do this additional work.
Turkmenistan apparently has a dust problem but does not have a COVID-19 problem. So presumably schools and universities will operate as usual come September.
Update August 21: The Ministry of Education issued directives on the new school year on August 14 (but these were not reported immediately). School will return on September 1 as is traditional, but with some changes to the health and safety regime. These include mandatory deep cleaning before the start of the school year, disinfection after every lesson, daily temperature checking for students, class sizes limited to 10-15 students, shorter lesson times, mask wearing, physical distancing in class (2 metres) and use of larger spaces for classes.
As with Tajikistan’s plans, there is no mention of how this will be paid for or who will do the additional cleaning etc.
Uzbekistan, which did a pretty good job of pivoting to distance learning earlier this year, has not yet decided on the format for the new school year. As at at last week, the Ministry was preparing for both face-to-face and online delivery. New TV lessons were being filmed from mid-August in preparation for online learning – by ‘online’, the government means both internet and TV based delivery.
I checked the Ministry of Education’s website and Telegram channel today (August 18) but there’s no update yet. An August 18 meeting of central and local officials noted that three options are still under consideration (as well as the two above, presumably the third is a hybrid mode) and stressed the importance of ensuring clean drinking water in all schools.
Update August 25: School may return in online and face-to-face format from September 14, confirms the Ministry of Education. A poll held by the Ministry showed that 70% of parents opted for online schooling.
Watch/listen again: My SCOLAR Talk on higher education in Central Asia
Thanks to everyone who tuned in live last week to watch my SCOLAR Talk with the talented Olesya Dovgalyuk. We had a great time chatting about everything from Ibn Sino (Avicenna) to the 400+% growth in the higher education system in contemporary Kyrgyzstan!
You can now watch a recording of the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNEwTwKc0X0
Or download the podcast and take me with you on your next run/walk/drive/wheel! While you’re about it, feel free to subscribe to SCOLAR Podcast to hear more episodes too:
Thanks again to Olesya and the SCOLAR team for the invite to chat.
SCOLAR Network: we are a Beijing-based non-profit youth network, affiliated with but independent from the Secretariat of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. We have several projects under our umbrella, through which we aim to:
- connect young people from the SCO region, including (primarily) Russia, Central Asia, China, India and Pakistan, with each other;
- bridge the gap between university graduates and professionals for career development; and, broadly,
- foster innovative collaborations for regional development and popularization of local cultural and historic heritage
Our projects include including Model SCO educational simulation game; Discussion Club, where we meet with experts and diplomats in Beijing; Ladies Circle, where we host talks with the female role figures from the region; Deep Dive, where we visit companies and institutions (including in different cities and countries) to learn about their cultures; and some others. SCOLAR on Facebook / LinkedIn / WeChat
Join me live: Thurs Aug 13 on SCOLAR Talk
This coming Thursday August 13 at 9.30am EST / 9.30pm CST, I will make my live streaming/podcast debut on SCOLAR Talk talking about all things higher education in Central Asia. Catch the chat live on Facebook or watch/listen later on YouTube and SCOLAR Podcast.
SCOLAR Talk is organized by the SCOLAR Network, a dynamic group based in Beijing whose aim is to connect young people in Russia, Central Asia, China, India and Pakistan (and beyond). You can read more about the network below, written in the team’s own words.
I’m really looking forward to talking with Olesya Dovgalyuk from SCOLAR on Thursday and to supporting their excellent initiative. Please join us live or subscribe to their YouTube channel/podcast to hear this and many other interesting episodes.
SCOLAR Network: we are a Beijing-based non-profit youth network, affiliated with but independent from the Secretariat of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. We have several projects under our umbrella, through which we aim to:
- connect young people from the SCO region, including (primarily) Russia, Central Asia, China, India and Pakistan, with each other;
- bridge the gap between university graduates and professionals for career development; and, broadly,
- foster innovative collaborations for regional development and popularization of local cultural and historic heritage
Our projects include including Model SCO educational simulation game; Discussion Club, where we meet with experts and diplomats in Beijing; Ladies Circle, where we host talks with the female role figures from the region; Deep Dive, where we visit companies and institutions (including in different cities and countries) to learn about their cultures; and some others. SCOLAR on Facebook / LinkedIn / WeChat
Covid-19 and education in Central Asia
With the world’s attention drawn to the coronavirus pandemic for the foreseeable future, this week’s post looks at the current impact of Covid-19 on education in Central Asia.
First, a few shout outs to others reporting on the spread of coronavirus in the region.
For general updates on what’s happening across Central Asia, check out EurasiaNet’s coronavirus dashboard, which is updated daily.
An early analysis has been provided in a brief open access policy memo by Marlene Laruelle and Madeline McCann for PONARS Eurasia. Published on March 27, it offers insights on the political and ideological responses of the post-Soviet states.
And on March 29, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty published its latest Majlis podcast on the topic of coronavirus in Central Asia. Majlis is always worth a listen to so do subscribe to the podcast once you’ve downloaded the current episode.
For education not specific to Central Asia, four suggested resources:
1) track the astonishingly high percentage of the world’s out of school children (currently over 80%) with UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning;
2) read a thoughtful letter to Education Ministers around the world by Professor Karen Mundy and Susannah Hares;
3) follow Alex Usher’s daily blog for responses to Covid-19 in higher education and some important reflection on what may life ahead; and
4) Canada specific but this spreadsheet by Ken Steele is an incredibly detailed and up to date report on the responses of higher education institutions around the country.
OK, now back to Central Asia.
Covid-19 has officially made it to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan but somehow neither Tajikistan nor Turkmenistan has reported any cases as at March 31 when this post was written. On April 1, schoolchildren in Tajikistan went back to school after their spring holidays to classrooms that have been disinfected twice – but not because there has been any coronavirus, of course…
So Tajikistan and Turkmenistan join an illustrious if rather short list of countries that also includes North Korea which are yet to report any cases. On the contrary, as has been well commented upon on social media, Tajikistan’s erstwhile Leader of the Nation Emomali Rahmon has overseen numerous well attended public events in recent days. This includes the national Navruz celebrations that brought thousands of people together in defiance of the global trend for physical distancing.
So it is to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan that we turn to see how they are responding in the sphere of education – it’s business as usual in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan’s schools and universities for now.
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan closed all schools and has moved the spring holiday from March 16 to April 5. Teachers are working from home during that period and a government sanctioned group is working on making alternative teaching and learning arrangements in the likely event that schools will remain closed after April 5.
Pre-schools are working as usual but parents are asked to keep their children at home if at all possible; no child will lose their place at the pre-school if they are not attending.
Colleges and universities rapidly switched to distance learning with an array of technologies available for use. These include solutions common around the world such as Google Classroom, Moodle, Coursera, and Zoom as well as locally built programs. Although the government’s webpage says that universities and colleges should already be familiar with at least some of these forms of online learning, one enterprising news agency has published a list of universities where distance learning is well established.
Students who are unable to travel home are being allowed to stay in dorms but must stay in their rooms. Kazakh students who study abroad and international students in Kazakhstan have had varying fates. Some, such as a group of 54 Kazakh students studying in the Russian city of Samara, were sent home on a free bus on March 30. They will be able to continue their studies at a distance, something that will keep them busy as they complete a mandatory self-quarantine once they get home. Less lucky has been a group of 115 Indian students who are currently stranded at Almaty airport, unable either to leave for home or to get back into the locked down city.
Kyrgyzstan
The response in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, where a state of emergency has also been declared, is similar to Kazakhstan’s (albeit with significantly less funding available from the state). Schools will be shut after a long vacation that runs until April 8. After that, they will continue learning using video lessons which will broadcast on two TV channels as well as YouTube.
To support distance learning, around 400 textbooks in four languages (Kyrgyz, Russian, Uzbek and Tajik) have been made freely available online. A fantastic looking website for school children, iBilim, has been released in two languages (Kyrgyz and Russian). The site is still being tested but kudos to the developers for getting it up so fast. A government hosted learning site is also being worked on but I couldn’t get into it when I tried today. As well as Zoom and Google Classroom, Kyrgyz teachers will also be communicating with their students using WhatsApp and Telegram.
Colleges and universities in Kyrgyzstan switched to distance learning on March 30 following a government directive. Students have also been granted a longer spring break during which time instructors and administrators were asked to develop plans to use technology to support distance learning and to supervise students’ independent work. Students have been advised to return to their family homes and remain there for the time being.
The University of Central Asia is making up to 90 beds available on its Naryn campus in Kyrgyzstan and is providing food and medical supplies to vulnerable members of the local community.
Looking a little further ahead, it’s not yet clear how higher education admissions will be managed. Students finishing high/secondary school this year may end up like their British counterparts i.e. with no final/university admission exams but graded based on their classwork. This has not yet been confirmed. Some universities that hold their own entrance exams (e.g. University of Central Asia) have postponed the exams that are scheduled for this time of year.
Uzbekistan
Mirroring Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan closed all pre-schools, schools, colleges and universities for an early spring break on March 16. From March 30, during the holiday, lessons began to be shown on TV.
Disability rights researcher Dilmurad Yusupov noted approvingly that TV classes have been accompanied by sign language interpretation (except for English classes, where there is a lack of professional interpreters). This ‘Online-maktab‘, as online/TV school is being called, is being broadcast on a range of TV channels to ensure they reach as many people as possible.
The Minister of Higher and Specialized Secondary Education Imomjon Majidov recommended on March 31 that students use the newly available free time to study and do research (he’s clearly not one to waste a good crisis). He will even be using an official Telegram channel, ‘We will defeat Covid-19‘ to set up an online contest for which prizes will be offered by the Minister’s office.
No decision has been made about when students will be able to return to study. A government directive approved on March 27 on distance learning enables the introduction of relevant technologies and approaches to support undergraduate and Master’s students; these are still under development. At least two foreign branch campus universities (South Korea’s Inha U and India’s Amity U) have switched to accepting admissions documents electronically for those seeking admission in September this year.
Until then, the government has been extremely active about keeping people up to date, primarily using Telegram (which is extremely popular in Uzbekistan) and the Coronavirus Info channel, which already has 1.3m subscribers. For example, the Ministry of Pre-school Education issued a post with guidance for parents on how to support their kindergarten/nursery aged children to access and make the most of the new TV/online lessons.
That is where things stand for now, at the end of March. As we are seeing around the world, the situation is changing day by day. I’ll report again if anything major changes in Central Asia.
Catten the curve!
The one suitable way to end this round up is, of course, through the medium of feline:
Why are Uzbek students abroad being sent home?
Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Education has announced that Uzbek students studying abroad in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan should return home and enrol at a domestic higher education institution.
The Ministry has been quick to underline that this decision is not connected to the novel coronavirus that has been panicking the world after spreading rapidly in and from China in early 2020.
Instead, the reasons given are two-fold. Firstly, parents of these internationally minded students are apparently concerned about the difficulties of getting money to their offspring. The second issue is that some of the universities where these students are studying are not listed in Uzbekistan’s national ranking. This in turns has led to a question about whether these universities are of sufficient quality for the nation’s next generation to be educated at.
Hm. Something’s not quite right here.
It’s true that students from Turkmenistan who are studying abroad have experienced difficulties with receiving money transfers from home or using their Turkmen-issued bank cards internationally, as I have reported on before. On that basis we could surmise that Uzbek students in Turkmenistan might indeed experience some problems with getting funds from their relatives. Tajikistan has been having a rocky relationship with money transfers too, though largely because the government is keen to scrape as much commission from the companies that are still allowed to operate. But I’m not aware of any potential issues for students in Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan.
So yes, there may be some truth to the first reason given – although is that enough in itself to summon all overseas students home? What about those studying in non-Central Asian countries?
As for the second issue of quality assurance, call me cynical but that just seems fabricated to cover for something else. Uzbekistan has barely been able to put together its own national ranking – the Ministry of Justice outright cancelled the Ministry of Education’s first effort in 2018!
Since then, Uzbekistan has proceeded to put together rankings but this is the first I’ve heard of them taking international (i.e. non-Uzbek) universities into account. It seems like an awful lot of work to go through when the country is still in the very initial phases of ranking its own universities.
The recall of students has implications for the students themselves, for the host universities, and for the relations between Uzbekistan and its neighbours.
Uzbekistan’s universities are notoriously hard to get into – not because of corruption (although that’s definitely a problem) but because there are so few places. In 2019, 1 million school leavers competed for under 150,000 places. Little wonder that many of those denied a place at a domestic university look abroad.
In a pattern than plays out across Central Asia, most of Uzbekistan’s international students head to Russia – 26,000 last year alone. But there are significant numbers nearer to home too: more than 4,000 in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan and almost 2,000 in Kyrgyzstan. So the loss of these students will have a major impact on the host universities.
This is a particular problem for Tajikistan’s Pedagogical University, which apparently has a whopping 2,500 Uzbek students on its books. Almost all of them are ‘contract’ (i.e. fee paying) students paying around 4,000 TJS (around US$400) per year, which all adds up to a significant amount of revenue for the university and will be sorely missed once the students leave.
Finally, this has ramifications for Uzbekistan’s bilateral and regional relations. Only recently starting to thaw, the Uzbek government has made huge inroads into improving its relations with its neighbours. In higher education this has led to, for example, many new cooperation agreements between universities and commitments to joint research and academic mobility.
This new and unexpected move to recall Uzbekistani students is thus not only surprising, but potentially throws a (small) spanner in the works as the overall schema for Central Asian regional relations had just begun to look more positive than ever before.
International students from the former Soviet space
The number of international students around the world is on the increase (see UNESCO graph for growth from 2011-17), and has now reached five million people.
Whilst there are major disparities in the desinations chosen by international students (Anglophone/former colonial nations top the list) and the resources they need to get there (the more financial/social capital your family has, the easier it is for you to become internationally mobile), one remarkable trend is that international students are now drawn from every country in the world.
That includes the former Soviet space, where student mobility until 1991 allowed travel only as far as Moscow, Leningrad (St Petersburg), Novosibirsk and a handful of other academic centres in the Soviet Union. Students could travel between republics but the idea of getting a degree from outside the communist space was out of the question.
In the nearly 30 years since the fall of the Soviet Union, that picture has changed dramatically. Long term readers of my blog will remember the results of a survey I did of international students from Tajikistan who had ended up far and wide, from the UK to Uruguay, from Slovakia to Singapore.
In revisiting the survey data for a new paper I am working on and will present at CHER in August 2019, I took the opportunity to look at longitudinal trends across the former Soviet space. Using data from UNESCO’s Institute for Statistcs, the graph below shows how patterns have changed since 1998 (the point at which data starts to become more reliable) across 14 of the 15 Soviet republics (there’s no data for Moldova). There are three time points over roughly ten year periods – 1998, 2008 and 2017, the latest data that is available.
The overall picture is of dramatic growth: if there were 120,000 international students leaving this region in 1998, that number had leaped to almost half a million by 2017. That’s an impressive increase of 265%!
As the graph shows, Kazakhstan now sends nearly 100,000 students abroad, a much higher number than second placed Ukraine (coming up for 80,000). And both those countries send significantly more students to other countries than Russia (not quite 60,000) despite Russia’s population being more than three times bigger than Ukraine’s and about six times higher than in Kazakhstan.
The big picture inevitably hides the array of scenarios seen in different countries at different points. In the last 10 years, for example, the number of intenrational students leaving Uzbekistan has been relatively flat, increasing by just 5%. Compare that to much larger increases in other countries such as Azerbaijan (475%) and Turkmenistan (550%). Over the period since 1998, the lowest growth in the number of international students has been from Estonia (up 20%), dwarfed by enormous increases in Tajikistan which are over 1,400%!
That’s a very quick analysis of some extremely interesting similarities and differences between these 14 countries. The aim was to make these numbers available in an accessible format and hopefully to inspire some curiosity to ask why we see these trends, and to think about how these might change over the next ten years.
Values, Identities and the Problems of Modernisation in Central Asia: Public lecture in Almaty, June 26
If you’re in Almaty on June 26, this upcoming University of Central Asia lecture looks great (although the word ‘modernization’ makes me queasy). Take some notes for me?
Values, Identities and the Problems of Modernisation in Central Asia
Eset Esengaraev
Sociologist, Candidate of Historical Sciences
Abstract
Central Asian societies feature characteristics of both a traditional and modern society. Industrial manufacturing and large-scale urbanisation are characteristics of modern society. At the same time, persistent tribalism, widely adopted socio-cultural logic of traditional nature, and the hierarchical structure of institutions suggest that Central Asia is still more traditional than modern. Such social patterns of Central Asian countries objectively results from their historical development, and therefore it is unlikely that the current situation can be radically changed in the short-run or even in the mid-term. Backbone institutions of our society are not subject to choice, but are the inheritance of historical opportunities.
This lecture will cover the modernisation of Central Asian countries, leveraging concepts from cognitive sociology (such as values, identities, institutes and types of social systems), and highlighting the importance of socio-cultural institutes in the modernisation of the state, society, economics and politics. It will also explore the degree of success of social modernisation projects. The lecturer sees modernisation as a transition to another level of socio-cultural complexity, which significantly exceeds the current condition of our society. At the current level (as determined by the socio-cultural theory of society), it is not sufficient to ensure adequate self-reflection on the condition of the society and possibilities for modernisation.
Biography
Eset Jesimbekovich Esengaraev was born in 1960 in the East-Kazakhstan Oblast (Province), and currently lives in Karaganda City. Esengaraev is a Sociologist, Candidate of Historical Sciences, and an Expert in social systems, social institutions, and modernisation. He is Senior Fellow of the Institute of Economic and Legal Research of Karaganda Economic University of Kazpotrebsoyuz. Esengarev has also authored several books including “Society, Institutes and Social Science” (Karaganda, 2017), “Management as Socio-Cultural Phenomena” (Karaganda, 2019; co-authored), and has publications in newspapers and websites in Kazakhstan and Russia.
Moderator
Pulat Shozimov
Professor, Doctor of Philosophy
Acting Head and Faculty Development Programme Manager
Aga Khan Humanities Project
University of Central Asia
Language
The lecture will be delivered in Russian.
Venue
National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Kazakhstan
Central Scientific Library, Conference Hall
Shevchenko Street
Almaty, Kazakhstan
The lecture will be delivered in online mode.
Registration
Please confirm your participation to Nurzhanuar Isaeva, Candidate of Biological Sciences, Professor, Coordinator of Faculty Development Programme/AKHP in Kazakhstan nurzhauar.issaeva@ucentralasia.org with your name and affiliation.
Ideas presented in this lecture reflect the personal opinion of the speaker and do not necessarily represent the views of the University of Central Asia and/or its employees.
