Case Study 4: Seeds of resilience - Youth Entrepreneurship in Rural Tajikistan

What is the central focus of a University of Central Asia (UCA) hydrology professor working in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast in the high Pamir mountains of eastern Tajikistan? The landscape resilience that comes from youth entrepreneurship that is connected to knowledge of climate change.

Collaborating with UCA faculty and a local environmental NGO, Anchor Schools led a feasibility study for the CLIENT (Climate and Environment)/RESILAND CA+ initiative of the World Bank. Anchor Schools worked with 10 undergraduate students from the Earth and Environmental Sciences department at UCA to develop youth entrepreneurship programming. The goal being to increase the adoption of landscape restoration practices in rural communities across central Asia.

Using a train-the-trainer model, UCA students were introduced to design thinking and entrepreneurship and learned how to deliver workshops where youth would come together to identify, test, and launch solutions to the harmful impacts of climate change in their communities. Then, during the summer of 2021, teams traveled to 10 villages to pilot workshops and spark ideas about how to address issues caused by climate change in their communities.

These experiences inspired UCA students to create an Earth and Environmental Sciences club on campus as well as a food waste management venture. More importantly, seeds of resilience have been planted in communities across the landscape of Tajikistan and more are spreading to neighboring countries. Moving forward, Anchor Schools is collaborating with UCA and the World Bank to expand the program to Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan to build university-NGO-school ecosystems that support youth climate entrepreneurship.