DUSHANBE, November 29, Asia-Plus - The 4 ^th two-day meeting of the Central Asian Gateway’s Steering Committee ended in Dushanbe on Tuesday, November 27.  

The meeting focused on the issues of the Central Asian Gateway (CAG) project development and aims to bring together interested stakeholders to allow establishing new partnerships, generating and accumulating new ideas that will help practitioners in facilitating sustainable development and integration in Central Asia.

The tentative agenda for the meeting included presentations highlighting the role of the CAG project in promoting integration through building partnerships and other mechanisms for knowledge sharing and experience exchange. The meeting also considered issues of involving development stakeholders in introducing efforts of multilateral agencies in fostering regional cooperation in Central Asia, ways of supporting development and integration strategies by research community and the role of electronic media in promoting cooperation in the region.

The format of the meeting was held in “open discussions” manner and was designed to set up an effective framework for establishing a fruitful dialogue between the development stakeholders, strengthening the capacity of the CAG project team and partner institutions, coordinating of joint efforts in the field of content management and further development and expanding partnerships.

            Sayora Arifjanova, a leading employee at the Center for Economic Research (Tashkent) telling the meeting noted that over the past two years, a number of people visiting the CAG portal has increased from 150 people per day to 600.

Sanjarbek Tursaliyev, Policy Analyst, Poverty Reduction and Economic Development, with the UNDP Regional Center for Eastern Europe and CIS (Bratislava) pointed to the importance of new initiatives undertaken as part of expansion of the database and analytical materials posted on the website.  

In the meantime, Muzaffar Olimov, director of the Research Center Sharq (Dushanbe), yesterday noted that there are certain obstacles in the way of development of integration in the countries of the region.   

According to Nuriddin Qarshiboyev, head of the National Association of Independent media of Tajikistan (Nansmit), the integration issues are not covered properly in electronic media of Tajikistan and access to Internet is limited.   

Under agreement with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) it has been decided to expand the CAG activity on coverage of processes taking place in the communications sector, trade and energy.  

The meeting resulted in signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on cooperation between the Center for Economic Research (Uzbekistan) and the news agencies AKIpress (Kyrgyzstan) and Asia-Plus (Tajikistan) in 2007.  

Central Asian Gateway Project aims to facilitate the experience and knowledge exchange in the field of development and integration of Central Asia. The project is implemented by the Center for Economic Research (Uzbekistan), Information Agency AKIpress (Kyrgyzstan) and Information Agency Asia Plus (Tajikistan) with support of the UNDP Regional Center (Slovakia) and UNDP COs in Central Asia.