Science and technology in Tajikistan

Science and technology in Tajikistan examines government efforts to develop a national innovation system and the impact of these policies.

[1] Tajikistan has recorded strong growth in recent years, thanks to various economic reforms, including the development of new sectors such as hydropower and tourism and effective measures to promote macro-economic stability.

The country has considerable assets: in addition to freshwater and diverse mineral resources, including gold, it has relatively large expanses of undeveloped land suitable for agriculture and environmentally friendly crops, a relatively inexpensive labour force and occupies a strategic geographical position, thanks to its border with China, making it a place of transit for merchandise and transportation networks.

In January 2014, the Minister of Agriculture announced the government's intention to reduce the land cultivated by cotton to make way for other crops.

[1] In addition to widespread poverty, the country faces other challenges: the need to develop the rule of law; the high cost of combating drug trafficking and terrorism on its border; low Internet penetration (16% of the population in 2013) and a small domestic market.

The government sector is not structured to meet the demands of a market economy and development plans and strategies are neither interconnected nor vertically integrated.

To compound matters, the modest allocation of financial resources is frequently inadequate to reach the goals set forth in national strategic documents.

Key problems to overcome include widespread malnutrition and illness among children, leading to absenteeism; poorly qualified teaching staff; lowly paid teachers, which affects morale and encourages corruption; a shortage of up-to-date textbooks; ineffective evaluation methods; and inadequate curricula at all levels of education for meeting the demands of the modern world, including an absence of science-based curricula at some levels.

Internet access is rare, even in schools equipped with computers, owing to frequent electricity cuts and a shortage of trained staff.

[2] In order to compensate for the funding shortfall and satisfy urgent needs, the education system is becoming increasingly dependent on ‘unofficial payments’ and international aid.

Moreover, administrative barriers hamper the establishment of effective public−private partnerships, limiting private sector participation at pre-school and vocational and university levels, in particular.

As a result, women often find themselves excluded from public life and decision-making processes, even though they are increasingly a household breadwinner.As part of current administrative reform within the National Development Strategy, gender considerations are to be taken into account in the drafting of future budgets.

According to the OECD,[3] the country has made ‘visible progress’ on the demand side, running training programmes for returning migrants and supporting financial literacy.

On the supply side, though, moves to facilitate the banking of remittances and introduce public support funds have been delayed by external and internal shocks.

At the level of economic reform, it favours export promotion, import substitution and investment, to be accomplished by empowering the public administration, removing barriers to private enterprise, legally protecting property rights and improving vocational training.

It is harder to improve the ratio of research spending to GDP when economic growth is strong: Tajikistan's economy grew by more than 6% a year for most of the period between 2007 and 2013.

[1] Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have all maintained a share of women researchers above 40% since the fall of the Soviet Union but only one in three Tajik scientists (34%) was a woman in 2013, down from 40% in 2002.

Tajikistan and the other four republics are also members of the Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation (CAREC) Programme, which also includes Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, China, Mongolia and Pakistan.

The landlocked Central Asian republics are conscious of the need to co-operate in order to maintain and develop their transport networks and energy, communication and irrigation systems.

The focus of this research projects is on three societal challenges considered as being of mutual interest to both the European Union and Central Asia, namely climate change, energy and health.

IncoNet CA builds on the experience of earlier projects which involved other regions, such as Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus and the Western Balkans.

It involves a consortium of partner institutions from Austria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Poland, Portugal, Tajikistan, Turkey and Uzbekistan.

The headquarters of ISTC were moved to Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan in June 2014, three years after the Russian Federation announced its withdrawal from the centre.