«Talented youth of Kyrgyzstan should not become the country’s most important export commodity,» Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, told at a press conference.
According to him, Kyrgyzstan remains overly dependent on the mining and tourism industries. It is also influenced by income from emigration. At the same time, remittances amounted to $2.4 billion, or almost 30 percent of the republic’s GDP in 2019.
Remittances support primarily poor rural households. In 2019, the poverty rate was reduced by 11 percent. But they cannot be a long-term strategy for the country’s development. This is an outflow of human capital on an unprecedented scale.
Olivier De Schutter
He urged Kyrgyzstan to move away from dependence on remittances and solve its problems by investing heavily in preschool education, improving the quality of schooling and strengthening its social security system to protect those people living in poverty.
«With 350,000 young people graduating from school this year, the republic must do more to provide its youth with real opportunities beyond migration. Work needs to be done to diversify the economy, provide quality jobs and support the transition of informal workers to official employment. Failure to do it will prolong the crisis of human capital outflow, which could ultimately damage the country’s development prospects,» the UN Special Rapporteur believes.
