I feel I have nearly completed everything I sought to accomplish in Almaty. Next week I will take a train ride to Astana for a few days. I hope to visit with some administrators of the Bolashak program, current Bolashak scholars and the USAID office there. If I can, I will collect budget information related to how much the Kazakh government contributes to university budgets each year. I was able to collect this information in Tajikistan from the Ministry of Finance and would like to have the same information for Kazakhstan so that I may make a comparison.
President Nazerbayev made Astana the capital only 7 years ago and so apparently there is a lot of construction but the former farming center is still only sparsely populated. I am working with a student in Astana, who is friends with one of my contacts here, and he is helping to arrange lodging at an apartment for me. Additionally he is helping to contact some of the current Bolashak scholars. I have been constantly humbled by the hospitality and willingness to help of so many of the people I have met in Kazakhstan. My project would have been much harder and not as successful without their help.
I understand that it is still too early (I still have 10 days here) to consider what I have taken from my experiences in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, but I already feel a great respect for the hospitality these cultures show their guests. It is something I hope to bring back with me so that I may show it towards guests, international and otherwise, in the future.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Sunday, July 15, 2007
A good start in Kazakhstan
I arrived in Almaty, Kazakhstan over a week ago now. It is a large city, much larger than Dushanbe, with many more stores, restaurants, movie theaters and traffic. I am staying in a small apartment a very short bus ride away from the center of the city. There is only one other person in the apartment with me right now, Valera a middle-age Korean-Kazakh man. His wife was here for a few days before leaving for Moscow to visit their daughter. Unlike in Tajikistan, where I could speak English with my host family, here I speak only Russian with Valera. It is proving to be a great opportunity to improve my Russian.
I have a few contacts here, some students at the different universities as well as a university administrator and a USAID employee. The people here are all very helpful and I have been able to meet some university officials with their help. By myself I have already met with many of the foreign organizations that run scholarships here, including British Council, DAAD (German government’s exchange program) and ACCELS, an American organization which helps to administer the Bolashak program.
The Bolashak program is actually a very large reason I choose to come to Kazakhstan. It is an international scholarship funded by the oil-wealthy Kazakh government. Initially, in the 1990’s and until 2 years ago, the scholarship was given to no more than 100 students, and then only to the children of Ministry officials. In 2005 the Kazakh President, Nazerbayev, made a decree that the program should be expanded to 3000 scholarships for undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate Kazakh students. Since then the Kazakh government has been funding scholarships while foreign organizations here help administer and place Kazakh students in universities abroad. For example, ACCELS and the British Council each place 450 students in schools in the US and UK, respectively. I understand that the mission of this program is to promote the development of Kazakhstan through educating the best Kazakh young people in an international setting and where universities are stronger.
I hope to meet with some more Bolashak scholars here to learn more about their experience with the scholarship and their impression of the 5-year service requirement they must fulfill for the Kazakh government after they graduate. There is also an interesting incentive written into the scholarship contract related to this service requirement. The students must sign over a relative’s apartment or house to the Kazakh government. If the student, once he or she graduates, refuses to fulfill the 5-year requirement of working ‘for the benefit of Kazakhstan,’ the government can seize the property.
I plan on taking a long (some say 12 some say 22 hour) train ride through the steppes to Astana, the capital city, to meet with some government officials about the Bolashak and hopefully meet alumni of other international scholarships. I still have much to do in my remaining 2 and a half weeks here but I feel I have gotten a good start.
I have a few contacts here, some students at the different universities as well as a university administrator and a USAID employee. The people here are all very helpful and I have been able to meet some university officials with their help. By myself I have already met with many of the foreign organizations that run scholarships here, including British Council, DAAD (German government’s exchange program) and ACCELS, an American organization which helps to administer the Bolashak program.
The Bolashak program is actually a very large reason I choose to come to Kazakhstan. It is an international scholarship funded by the oil-wealthy Kazakh government. Initially, in the 1990’s and until 2 years ago, the scholarship was given to no more than 100 students, and then only to the children of Ministry officials. In 2005 the Kazakh President, Nazerbayev, made a decree that the program should be expanded to 3000 scholarships for undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate Kazakh students. Since then the Kazakh government has been funding scholarships while foreign organizations here help administer and place Kazakh students in universities abroad. For example, ACCELS and the British Council each place 450 students in schools in the US and UK, respectively. I understand that the mission of this program is to promote the development of Kazakhstan through educating the best Kazakh young people in an international setting and where universities are stronger.
I hope to meet with some more Bolashak scholars here to learn more about their experience with the scholarship and their impression of the 5-year service requirement they must fulfill for the Kazakh government after they graduate. There is also an interesting incentive written into the scholarship contract related to this service requirement. The students must sign over a relative’s apartment or house to the Kazakh government. If the student, once he or she graduates, refuses to fulfill the 5-year requirement of working ‘for the benefit of Kazakhstan,’ the government can seize the property.
I plan on taking a long (some say 12 some say 22 hour) train ride through the steppes to Astana, the capital city, to meet with some government officials about the Bolashak and hopefully meet alumni of other international scholarships. I still have much to do in my remaining 2 and a half weeks here but I feel I have gotten a good start.
Monday, July 2, 2007
Coming to a close in Tajikistan
I have now been in Tajikistan for nearly 3 weeks and will fly to Almaty, Kazakhstan on July 5th. I am very happy with the work that I've completed here in Dushanbe and look forward to comparing it to what I find in Kazakhstan. Over the past few days I have continued to interview scholarship alumni and scholarship administrators. Today I feel I had an especially productive day. I have been in contact with the Deputy Minister of Finance here and today with the help of his daughter, who is my age and speaks English, I looked through the statistic files held in the Ministry of Finance. So now I have numbers from the past 15 years on student enrollment, numbers of universities, students per department, etc. Additionally the Ministry is preparing a table for me of information for a few of the universities here in Dushanbe, which will include teacher salaries, school budgets, etc. I hope this information will be useful for me in the future to conduct some quantitative analysis of the university system here.
Later in the day I met with Muhammadi, a student who has just finished his dissertation here and who is a Chevening alum (the graduate level scholarship available through the British Embassy here). He is the poster child for the Chevening scholarship. Muhammadi studied development economics at Manchester University in the UK and has since returned to Tajikistan to work at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and acted as a senior lecturer at Tajik State National University. The money he earns at ADP allows him to focus only on teaching at the university and he has acquired the reputation of being a strict (aka no bribes, ever) instructor. He also has set up a website using grant money from SOROS to develop the economics department at the university by making online resources more accessible to students. I enjoyed speaking with him and he really has taken his international experience in an ideal direction. When I asked him how he felt about these types of international scholarships as a development initiative he responded using a Russian saying "one soldier is not the fight on the battlefield." An interesting if not dim way of describing his and other alumni's place in the path towards development in Tajikistan.
I will give another update once I have settled in Almaty. I look forward to that leg of my trip and to reading the blogs of the other Community-Based Research Fellows! All of the projects sound so interesting.
Later in the day I met with Muhammadi, a student who has just finished his dissertation here and who is a Chevening alum (the graduate level scholarship available through the British Embassy here). He is the poster child for the Chevening scholarship. Muhammadi studied development economics at Manchester University in the UK and has since returned to Tajikistan to work at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and acted as a senior lecturer at Tajik State National University. The money he earns at ADP allows him to focus only on teaching at the university and he has acquired the reputation of being a strict (aka no bribes, ever) instructor. He also has set up a website using grant money from SOROS to develop the economics department at the university by making online resources more accessible to students. I enjoyed speaking with him and he really has taken his international experience in an ideal direction. When I asked him how he felt about these types of international scholarships as a development initiative he responded using a Russian saying "one soldier is not the fight on the battlefield." An interesting if not dim way of describing his and other alumni's place in the path towards development in Tajikistan.
I will give another update once I have settled in Almaty. I look forward to that leg of my trip and to reading the blogs of the other Community-Based Research Fellows! All of the projects sound so interesting.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
June 26th
I am a Public Policy major at UNC working on a indepedent research project in Central Asia this summer. I intend to learn more about the international scholarships different institutions, such as SOROS, British Council and the governments themselves provide to top students in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. This includes learning about why these scholarships exist and what their impact is on the participants or even on the country. I choose these two countries because Tajikistan is the least developed and poorest of the 5 former-Soviet Central Asian republics and Kazakhstan is by far the wealthiest and arguably the most developed. I want to understand the range of issues facing higher education and felt that this was the best way.
I arrived in Dushanbe, Tajikistan's capital on June 15th. I spent 4 weeks in the Balkans before this and so took the first couple days to get settled and organize my time in Tajikistan. Since then I have been meeting with officers from different embassies and officials in different international organizations and the government, including the Deputy Minister of Education. I have learned a lot about higher education here in Tajikistan and am curious to compare it to that of Kazakhstan.
The most striking element in education here (and with the government itself) is the rampant corruption. I have talked to multiple students at many different universities, inside and outside of Dushanbe, who say bribing teachers is the norm. Students are confident that (there are exceptions of course) come exam time, they can pay their teachers $20-50 to receive a high mark on their exam and in the class. Indeed it is not just on students side, some teachers demand a bribe or else they threaten to fail them. With university teacher salaries at an average of $900-1000 a year, extra money to feed their familie via bribes is expected. This of course leads to very poor learning environment. I have spoken, err, tried to speak with students who graduated as English Language majors (as in the US, 4 years of study), who could not understand a word I spoke. This of course is not everyone, but it is very common place. It is no wonder why many students wish to enroll in foreign institutions.
I look forward to learning more and expect to receive some statistics from the Ministry of Finance soon and hope that they may give me more clarity about student enrollment and university profiles.
I arrived in Dushanbe, Tajikistan's capital on June 15th. I spent 4 weeks in the Balkans before this and so took the first couple days to get settled and organize my time in Tajikistan. Since then I have been meeting with officers from different embassies and officials in different international organizations and the government, including the Deputy Minister of Education. I have learned a lot about higher education here in Tajikistan and am curious to compare it to that of Kazakhstan.
The most striking element in education here (and with the government itself) is the rampant corruption. I have talked to multiple students at many different universities, inside and outside of Dushanbe, who say bribing teachers is the norm. Students are confident that (there are exceptions of course) come exam time, they can pay their teachers $20-50 to receive a high mark on their exam and in the class. Indeed it is not just on students side, some teachers demand a bribe or else they threaten to fail them. With university teacher salaries at an average of $900-1000 a year, extra money to feed their familie via bribes is expected. This of course leads to very poor learning environment. I have spoken, err, tried to speak with students who graduated as English Language majors (as in the US, 4 years of study), who could not understand a word I spoke. This of course is not everyone, but it is very common place. It is no wonder why many students wish to enroll in foreign institutions.
I look forward to learning more and expect to receive some statistics from the Ministry of Finance soon and hope that they may give me more clarity about student enrollment and university profiles.
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