More Scholarships Needed in Uzbekistan

   

27-Aug-07

Uzbekistan’s shortage of skilled workers will intensify unless more scholarships are introduced to help young people through university, say NBCentralAsia observers.

Nearly 180 graduate and postgraduate students from Uzbekistan won full scholarships from Moscow to study at Russian universities.

Around 1,000 students from Uzbekistan have been granted such an opportunity in the past ten years.

According to the latest census, 50 to 60 per cent of Uzbekistan’s 26-million population are under 25 years of age. Even though the constitution guarantees their right to higher education, just ten per cent currently have access to this.

Most families cannot afford the fees, given that average salary is around 100 US dollars per month and higher education in Uzbekistan costs between 200 to 5,000 dollars a year.

While the government pays the tuition fees for the 80,000 students with the highest admissions test scores, NBCentralAsia observers say that there are still not enough schemes to give young people proper access to higher education.

A local analyst, who wishes to remain anonymous, says there are not enough scholarships available, with Russia’s support programme one of the few options open to Uzbek students.

The government has shut down numerous western foundations and organisations running education programmes over the past five years and the opportunity to study in developed countries has been slashed, the observer says.

While Uzbekistan has the largest army in Central Asia and continues to develop several gas fields, it still lacks the capacity to train skilled specialists to work in these areas.

Ilham Mamasaliev, a university professor from Tashkent, believes that Uzbekistan’s manpower shortage in education, energy and agriculture could be filled if more young people were educated in Russia.

“Today’s Uzbek education is really lagging behind education in Russia, mainly because of the outflow of scientists and teachers to other countries in the [Commonwealth of Independent States],” said Mamasaliev.

Russia and Uzbekistan do not recognise one another’s university diplomas and have no plans to cooperate further on higher education.

But another NBCentralAsia observer based in Tashkent fears that relying on exchange programmes to educate students may exacerbate the brain drain in Uzbekistan.

He explained that many of the students who studied in the United States, Europe and Asia as part of the Umid government foundation programme - established by Uzbekistan to support education of youth abroad - in the early Nineties never returned home.

(NBCentralAsia draws comment and analysis from a broad range of political observers across the region)