The vanguard of digital transformation and academic mobility for young people – the EDB’s proposals at the CIS and EAEU Youth Forum
Bishkek, 29 August 2022. Promoting academic mobility and attention to digital initiatives should be a form of support for young people in Eurasia. These proposals were put forward by Vladimir Pereboyev, Head of the Eurasian Development Bank’s (EDB) Research Department, and Viktor Shakhmatov, Director of the EDB Directorate for Digital Initiatives, at the CIS and EAEU Youth Forum in Cholpon-Ata (Kyrgyz Republic).
‘Young people are a key and future-oriented social group, comprising around 20% of the EAEU population. This group has specific demands for Eurasian integration. These include quality education, guaranteed employment, educational and labour mobility, confidence in the future when creating families and participation in shaping the agenda of the Eurasian Economic Union bodies,” said Vladimir Pereboyev.
According to him, this social group, aged 18 to 34, had a generally positive attitude towards Eurasian integration. That said, academic mobility within the EAEU has stagnated at best. According to data aggregated by the EEC, the number of students coming to Russia from EAEU countries has been slowly decreasing year on year – from 89,700 in the 2015/16 academic year to 81,800 in 2020/21. Only Kazakhstan has seen a gradual increase in students from EAEU countries, but the total is small – 1,900 in 2015/16 and 2,500 in 2020/21. Overall, the dynamics of student mobility across the EAEU are rather negative, while young people’s interest in pursuing education in Western Europe and China is more stable.
“One way of realising the potential of Eurasian integration for young people could be to launch the Chokan Valikhanov Academic Mobility Programme within the EAEU and the Greater Eurasian Partnership in order to encourage educational exchanges, involving tens of thousands of participants per year with flexible funding and creditable programmes. This will create structural elements of integration in education – a network of leading universities with the involvement of businesses and with a focus on training engineers and advanced personnel for the progressive development of Eurasian integration,” Vladimir Pereboyev voiced the EDB’s proposal.
Viktor Shakhmatov, representative of the Bank’s Fund for Digital Initiatives, noted that “the creators of the world’s largest digital ecosystems came up with their products when they were aged under 30 or even under 25.”
“Young people are the vanguard of digital transformation that in many ways defines the new technological order. This suggests that the key to successful digital development in Eurasia should be an infrastructure that provides young IT professionals and entrepreneurs with the opportunity to generate and implement their ideas and initiatives and turn them into competitive digital products,” he stressed.
Additional Information:
The Eurasian Development Bank (EDB) is an international financial institution investing in Eurasia. For more than 15 years, the Bank has worked to strengthen and expand economic ties and foster comprehensive development in its member countries. The EDB's charter capital totals US $7 billion. Its portfolio consists principally of projects with an integration effect in transport infrastructure, digital systems, green energy, agriculture, manufacturing, and mechanical engineering. The Bank adheres to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and ESG principles in its operations.
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