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.