Education opportunities in Kazakhstan
Published 27 October 2014
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1. Market potential
The Kazakhstan education and training market has been identified as a high value education opportunity (HVO) for the UK owing to:
- Significant business opportunities having already been secured by UK education and training providers in deals worth more than £50 million e.g. UK providers are running or developing programmes for a number of current and future vocational and technical education colleges
- Significant potential for future business – accessible value to the UK in excess of £100 million
- Opportunities existing across a range of sub-sectors – including teacher training, English language training (ELT) and other languages training, assessment, educational technology, technical and vocational education and training (TVET), inclusive education and higher education (HE)
- UK education and training expertise being highly regarded – for instance, since its launch in 1993, nearly 40% of Bolashak scholars have studied in the UK on under-graduate, post-graduate and doctoral programmes, making the UK the favourite destination for Bolashak students
2. Large-scale education and training opportunities in 2015/16
Kazakhstan is a UKTI Education priority market and a Kazakhstan high value education and training opportunity has been identified based on the following seven areas:
- Assessment
- Educational technology
- English and other languages training
- Higher education partnerships
- Inclusive education
- Teacher education
- Modernisation of TVET provision
The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Kazakh Ministry of Education and Science (MOES) to facilitate UK engagement to support the delivery of MOES’s State Programme of Education targets in these seven areas.
During 2015/16, opportunities are expected to work with MOES and associated government departments and agencies to deliver the higher education partnership and modernisation of TVET programmes.
3. Additional market information
3.1 Geographical considerations
Stretching across central Asia, Kazakhstan is the world’s largest landlocked country, bordering Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and the Caspian Sea. It is the world’s ninth largest country; its territory of more than 2.7 million square kilometres is similar in size to all of Western Europe.
Kazakhstan is the wealthiest country in Central Asia due its natural resources and wide-ranging economic reforms in the 1990s. Exploitation and export of massive oil and gas reserves resulted in annual GDP growth of more than 8% from 2002.
3.2 Education sector overview
Education is one of the top priorities in ‘Kazakhstan 2050’, the country’s development strategy, which aims to establish Kazakhstan in the top 30 of the world’s most competitive nations. To support this plan, MOES launched the 10-year State Programme of Educational Development (2010-20) with specific targets to ensure access to quality education for sustainable economic growth across areas including:
- Educational provision in technical and vocational education and training (TVET) and higher education (HE)
- Educational consulting
- Educational technology, resources and equipment
- English language training
- Qualifications and curriculum planning
- Teacher education and “train-the-trainer” programmes
The relatively young (average age 28) and growing population is well educated with an adult literacy rate of 99%. Both Kazakh and Russian are official languages, with Russian the language of inter-ethnic and business communication. A trilingual policy announced by President Nazarbayev sets out an objective that 15% of the population of circa 17 million people should speak fluent Kazakh, Russian and English by 2020.