Central Asia Working to Become a Tech Powerhouse
By Elaine Pasquini

Washington: On April 18, 2023, the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center hosted a panel to explore the opportunities and challenges facing Central Asia in its emerging role of becoming a tech powerhouse and major tech exporter.

Anatoly Motkin	Arkadiy Dobkin
Elena Son	Sarah Wall
Suriya Jayanti

In March, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met in Astana with the foreign ministers of the five Central Asian countries – Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan – signaling Washington’s plans to devote more high-level attention to the region. These meetings will help to improve the security and socio-economic challenges these countries face, and potentially attract more foreign investors.

“This year the world has finally realized it cannot afford to ignore Central Asia,” said Suriya Evans-Pritchard Jayanti, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. “Wedged between Russia, China and India, the countries of this region boast amazing human potential, amazing human capital, mineral richness, natural resources and tech expertise and wherewithal.”

Anatoly Motkin, founder and president of the StrategEast Center for a New Economy, pointed out that one important feature of the tech industry is that each IT job creates four jobs in support sectors, such as transportation, construction and the restaurant or hospitality fields. “So, the overall impact of developing IT extends way beyond just developing IT,” he enthused.

Issues that affect growth but need to be improved to attract international investors are internet speed, English language skills, immigration procedures and implementing a less than 10 percent flat rate tax, he said.

While at one time the biggest challenge for the growth of the tech industry and tech exports in the Central Asian region was to popularize the idea for young people to get involved in thinking about IT as a career, “now,” he reported, “one out of three young people in Uzbekistan wants to become an IT specialist.”

The US government has all necessary means to support tech growth and could “send a strong signal that this region is a trusted technology destination,” Motkin said. “Government and private companies need to work together. The countries are stronger if they work together, and the US should encourage them to act as a region.”

Elena Son, as executive director of the American-Uzbekistan Chamber of Commerce, the US-Kyrgyzstan Business Council, the US-Tajikistan Business Council and the US-Afghanistan Business Initiative, often meets with the ambassadors of Central Asian countries in Washington to discuss ways to increase development of the IT industries. Furqat Sidiqov, Uzbekistan’s ambassador to the United States, recently told her there are presently 30 Uzbek companies working in Silicon Valley, California. “There is a readiness in these countries to work with American companies,” Son noted. “IT is an evolving industry and is relatively young.”

“What makes Central Asia so distinct and unique is the Central Asian governments’ ability and eagerness to listen and learn,” she said. “They keep their minds and ears open to American companies’ suggestions and learn about their experiences as to what works and what doesn’t for attracting foreign investment.”

There are challenges in developing IT and other industries in Central Asia, and, according to Son, the biggest difficulty concerns security and cybersecurity. The ability for local companies to innovate, modernize and educate requires security and stability. In this sense, cooperation with the US government is essential for Central Asian governments to create a safe and stable investment, she stated.

“I think engaging in a dialogue will create even more conditions for American companies to invest because they want a larger share of the market, more opportunities to be able to create and innovate,” Son added.

Arkadiy Dobkin, chairman of the board, CEO and president of EPAM Systems, Inc, noted that governments in the Central Asia region support and promote the IT industry because it will bring in money, experience, education and “most importantly, if they are successful, they keep talent in the country instead of fleeing,” he said.

In his view, the main challenges for development are geopolitical and security issues. But because the world has globalized so much in the past 20 years, in general, “clients have gotten exposed to new locations, which is helpful, but this has created a lot of questions.” It’s important, he added, for governments to lead these growth efforts as opposed to the private sector, although both are necessary.

Importantly, too, as the sector is developing, “the number of women programmers or women IT personalities will be in percentages as high as any in the Western world in three or four years,” he predicted. “In this industry, I don’t think there are any restrictions in this region today.”

Sarah Wall, project director of Future Growth Initiative at Palladium, has worked with USAID in Central Asia since 2015. Because the tech industry is so new and developed so rapidly, it’s a challenge to keep up with the pace of the industry, she said. Understandably, governments are trying to develop their policies and particularly want to ensure that private sector and community voices are included, she said.

This is a real opportunity to make the sector more inclusive, especially with respect to including women and people from rural areas, because “it is new, and you are pushing against less rigid traditional norms around inclusivity,” she argued.

From the developmental sector point of view, the Future Growth Initiative works across multiple sectors, Wall explained, but the information and communication technology (ICT) sector is unique in a lot of ways. “The issue of the location of Central Asia is less of a problem than it is in other sectors and the challenges are more addressable with the soft skills and capacity building that programs like Future Growth Initiative address,” she said. “So, it is a unique and exciting sector to work in because it’s emerging, it’s something that is on the forefront of the future of economic growth.”

(Elaine Pasquini is a freelance journalist. Her reports appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.Ink.)