Emma Harden-Wolfson

Happy new year to one and all! I hope 2025 is a good one for you and for the world – and I hope I don’t regret saying that come December…

In the world of Central Asian higher education, Kazakhstan continues to remodel, reform and reorganize. Here are just a couple of recent examples of proposed changes to research, which is increasingly lauded as a key part of the higher education and science system.

A proposed new research university stems from deepening educational cooperation between Kazakhstan and the Republic of Korea, which has seen several high-level university and government visits in recent months. During one such summit, in late August 2024, the Minister of Science and Higher Education Sayasat Nurbek announced the creation of the Qazaqstan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (QAIST). QAIST will be designed on lines similar to its Korean counterpart, KAIST, specializing in high tech research on areas such as quantum engineering. I haven’t see anything else yet about QAIST, but with a memorandum of cooperation in place between the two countries, I expect to see developments before too long.

Meanwhile, I’m losing count of the number of times that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has been reorganized. Having started off as the Academy of Sciences, an exclusively research-driven legacy of the Soviet higher education system, it was upgraded to the National Academy of Sciences during the 1990s. Then, in the 2000s, the government changed its legal status, effectively attempting to abolish it as a separate structure and merge the various parts of it into universities.

Now, however, research is standing back on its own two feet and, as of this month, the NAS has received a new status as a ‘higher scientific organization’. It’s not clear to me whether this is in place of its previous status as a non-profit joint stock company (Kazakhstan has some wonderful – and I think unique – designations for higher education institutions) but it’s the only difference I can see in the wording of the government declaration that discusses the latest reshuffle.

The NAS currently plays a steering role in setting the national research agenda. This includes horizon scanning for future scientific directions as well as analysing current strategic priorities and actually doing research. The NAS also supports the development of science and research in Kazakhstan through functions such as assessing research funding applications and participating in international research collaborations.