Uzbekistan: The Aral Sea Surprise

How a Joint UN initiative is planting the seeds for success in local communities

By Adam Rogers, original essay appeared on Medium in November 2022.

After arriving in Nukus, a bustling desert town in the far west of Uzbekistan –the capital of the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan — I reached out to UNDP programme manager Alisher Utemisov to learn more about what he and his teams were doing in the region. Alisher assigned three team leaders to accompany me to Muynak, a once vibrant fishing town on the now non-existent shores of the Aral Sea. I spent the day with Sultanbek Baymuratov, Berdibek Nagmetov and Murat Mustapaev.

The Aral Sea region is often associated with disaster, an ecological catastrophe of biblical proportions, caused by a mistake in the 1950s when man in his wisdom (and yes these were men making the decisions) diverted the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers to grow cotton. Experts now say that up to 75 percent of the water diverted was lost to evaporation or faulty irrigation. In other words, if the planning were better planned, the planners could have had their fishcake and eaten it too. But, alas, the cotton fields bloomed, and the Aral Sea (and the once-prosperous fishing communities that dotted its coastline) died.

Upon a recent visit to the area in October 2022, I was struck by the emptiness of the vast stretch of barren landscape, old ships rusting away at the bottom of a sea one can only imagine to be. After visiting the local museum and the Aral Sea Memorial with its glimpses of gloom, I was nearly overcome with depression.

The Aral Sea began to dry up in the late 1950s and is now mostly gone, leaving devastated and vulnerable communities. This view is from the once-vibrant fishing village of Muynak.

But fortunately, in the midst of melancholy, I discovered good news in the form of numerous micro-projects that lit up the local community of Muynak like rays of light. The projects were designed in synergy through a programme to promote local economic development, sustainable food security and economic self-sufficiency in the local community and were initiated and managed through a tripartite collaboration of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The official and rather verbose title of the Joint Programme is “Unleashing young people’s and vulnerable citizens’ creativity and innovation by strengthening their adaptive capacity to address the economic and food insecurities in the exposed communities of the Aral Sea region.”

Quite often such lengthy titles are long on character count and short on substance. In this case, however, the results speak for themselves. One of the initiatives within the programme is to support women, youth and vulnerable groups, those people living on the edge of society in particularly precarious living conditions, on the precipice of extreme poverty. Often these people have all the ingenuity, energy and zeal to succeed in life, but just need a bit of support to move forward.

Mr. Jumanazar Begdullaev is one of these people with motivation in need of means. He participated in a needs assessment organized by the Joint Programme, and attended a series of agricultural training sessions. He requested and received material to build a 50 m2 greenhouse in his back yard, in which he is growing a variety of crops he plans to sell in the local market.

“With the profits I make from this greenhouse I plan to construct another in the remaining space of my home,” he said in response to a question I asked him about what he would do with the money he earns. “And then with the combined profits of both, I will invest in fish farming. I will be able to put my family and some of my friends to work, earning a living.”

Jumanazar Begdullaev participated in the needs assessment and received a greenhouse, where he is growing vegetables to sell in the local market. With the profits, he plans to build another greenhouse just next to it, and with the combined profits he plans to establish a fish farm. “One way or another,” he told me, “we will bring the fish back to Muynak.”

Ms Zamira Jaulibaeva was unemployed and low on hope when she heard about the participatory needs assessment the UN Joint Programme was conducting. She too participated and was eager to learn about innovative agricultural practices. She noticed there were no bee-farming activities in the community and thus proposed starting one. She received a bee apiary and beekeeping tools and within a few months she and her husband Jenis Bodikov were producing delicious honey served in jars.

Zamira Jaulibaeva is the first beekeeper in Muynak. She and her husband now produce honey for the local market with equipment and training provided by the UN Joint Programme led by UNDP.

We also visited the home of Ayjan Boribaeva, who was also unemployed and struggling to secure enough food to feed her family. She was interested in agriculture and livestock production and in the workshops she learned about hydroponics. With the support of the Joint Programme, she was given a hydroponic system, which she quickly set up in a corner of her home. With it, she produced enough wheat to feed six goats. “Compared to more conventional methods of growing fodder, this new system produces much more nutritious fodder than growing outside in the yard, and uses much less space,” she told me through an interpreter. “And the goats get fatter faster and provide more milk.”

Ayjan Boribaeva grows wheat to feed her goats, using a hydroponic system she received through the programme. “The goats get fatter faster and provide more milk,” she told me.

Just down the road from where Ayjan is growing her wheat, Ms Urazmetova Sharofat is running a sewing workshop so that young women from her community could learn valuable skills that would provide a needed service while helping them earn an income. To help her realize her dream, the programme provided the needed equipment and additional training through an outreach initiative that also supported 10 other business projects in the area in the fields of cosmology, cooking and sewing. Although promoting women in these activities may be seen by some as reinforcing women stereotypes, they are also viable businesses that are helping many women gain financial independence.

Urazmetova Sharofat received specialized training and high-end sewing equipment that she uses to both provide an important service to the community, and to pass on her skills to others who want to do the same.

Building a new future for the Aral Sea, one mind at a time

Responding to a decree from the President of Uzbekistan to support “additional measures to ensure employment of the population” and to attract “the poor and unemployed to entrepreneurship” the Joint Programme focused on increasing the capacity and competitiveness of a local vocational training centre in early 2022. Vocational training centres have been established in two additional target districts in Karakalpakstan with a total population of more than 187,000 people. To ensure the investments in time and resources actually meet existing demands, a market assessment was conducted and capacity gaps were identified. The results revealed several skillsets in most demand in the labour market, including cooks, plumbers, beauticians, tailors and ICT specialists. The Joint Programme helped acquire the necessary tools and equipment for training in each of these areas, hired qualified trainers to teach master classes and secured accreditation for licensing and certification. More than 30 young people have so far graduated from the programme and are now running their own local businesses in the local economy.

A similar assessment conducted early in the pandemic revealed the need to promote the development of digital technologies in secondary school education. The objective is to create a network of “smart, connected communities” with access to digital libraries and resources hitherto out of reach of such remote places. At an early stage of the Joint Programme, and with the additional support of the Multi-donor Trust Fund for Human Security in the Aral Sea Region, a pilot school was selected to receive modern computer equipment, furniture and a dedicated internet connection. The Fund brings together the expertise of a diverse network of stakeholders, including international financial institutions and donor organizations, the Government of Uzbekistan, regional and local authorities, UN agencies, and community-based organizations.

Now thanks to the MPHSTF, 414 pupils and 71 teachers now have access to the same digital libraries and resources as the schools in New York City. When I visited the school, around 20 girls were in a class learning how to use Microsoft Excel. This was an encouraging sight: In many places around the world, the so-called “STEM” subjects of science, technology, engineering, and math — are dominated by boys. It’s great to see this remote school in Uzbekistan getting girls more involved. I just hope the interest goes beyond high school — globally, women make up only around a quarter of the STEM workforce. The world is facing way too many challenges to leave it up to the boys to solve. Furthermore, the economic opportunities afforded in STEM could provide many women with the wherewithal needed to demand equality.

Thanks to the programme and the Multi-donor Trust Fund for Human Security in the Aral Sea Region, 414 pupils and 71 teachers now have access to the same digital libraries and resources as schools in New York City.

We made one other stop in a small community outside Muynak, in Kunrad district. There, a similar consultative appraisal process was carried out to determine how the Joint Programme could help to address specific needs that public funds had been unable to reach. The community agreed in near unison to support a health clinic that had to operate during the pandemic without adequate water or sewage facilities. It was thus provided with a water supply network, a solar heating system, and a new sewage system.

The nurses at Polyclinic no 22 in Kungrad District, which serves a community of 3,073 people, now have clean, hot water and improved hygienic conditions for their patients.

The UNDP management team discussing programme progress with local authorities. From left to right: Berdibek Nagmetov (social services and monitoring/evaluation), Murat Mustapaev (income generation), Sultanbek Baymuratov (community resilience building), and (right) Esbosinov Ongar (Deputy director of the Muynak district Employment Assistance Center) and Matmuratov Shukirbay (Director of the Muynak district Employment Assistance Center).

I left Muynak feeling inspired and impressed, but somehow also discouraged. Over the past 25 years working in development, I have visited hundreds of such initiatives, like stars across a stellar expanse — just enough to keep out the darkness and despair, but not yet enough to ensure the world reaches the ambitious goal of eliminating all forms of poverty by the year 2030. We have just seven years left to accelerate sustainable solutions like these to all the world’s biggest challenges — ranging from poverty and gender to climate change, inequality and closing the finance gap. If we are to get there in time, as envisaged in Agenda 2030, we will need to dramatically scale up and replicate the shining stars like the ones I saw today. We also will have to work harder to prevent the backsliding that is going on in places where two steps forward are followed by three or more back and where greed, politics and wars are pushing millions of people back into an abyss of anguish and anxiety.

My car sped quickly down a bumpy road past sparse forests of saxaul trees, planted by the local forestry department to keep the sand and dirt in place. Realizing that in life we often get more of what we focus on, I forced my mind to contemplate the lives of those men and women I had encountered today and those of the thousands of others whom I have met whose lives have been improved through similar projects introduced by UNDP and its partners across the globe. I kept wondering, however, that if just a small percentage of the resources spent on military budgets were invested in supporting local governments to deliver development for their people, how the world would be a much better place for everyone.

Alisher Utemisov coordinates the UNDP programme in Karakalpakstan, an autonomous republic in northwestern Uzbekistan.

The author with Murat Mustapaev, Sultanbek Baymuratov and Berdibek Nagmetov.

(Full disclosure: the author worked with UNDP for 22 years before taking early retirement in 2018. He continues to support the organization on limited consulting assignments in between writing books. He was not on assignment when visiting these projects, but did so out of curiosity and a desire to learn more about the region. All photos were taken with a OnePlus 7T Pro 5G McLaren edition, except the opening photo, which came from Shutterstock (Valerio Bonaretti).