In autumn 2025, the DFG undertook a number of activities as part of its strategic effort to expand cooperation with Central Asia. DFG Vice President Professor Karin Jacobs travelled to Kazakhstan for cooperation talks and took part in a networking event at the Embassy of Uzbekistan in Berlin.  A delegation trip to Tashkent provided an opportunity for the DFG to prepare a scientific event together with Professor Georg Guggenberger, scientific member of the Senate, on site. Furthermore, a delegation visited Turkmenistan for the first time.

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This year, the DFG has stepped up its engagement in Central Asia even further and pursued a wide range of activities in the region. Given the current geopolitical challenges, cooperation with the Central Asian region is becoming increasingly important, including the field of research. All five Central Asian countries, and Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in particular, are moving into focus due to their growing scientific potential and their relevance in terms of addressing global research questions.

In September, Vice President Jacobs (Saarland University) visited Kazakhstan and held meetings at the country’s two main research hubs with ministerial representatives, funding organisations, universities and the Academy of Sciences. The aim here was to present the DFG’s ongoing initiative to connect German universities of applied sciences (UAS) with researchers in Central Asia and explore further opportunities for cooperation. 

In Astana she met the Deputy Minister for Research, Gulsat Kobenova, to discuss possible entry points for German-Kazakh research projects. In this context, the latest results of the Excellence Strategy and the newly published English-language DFG Funding Atlas were presented together with the DFG’s UDIF-HAW initiative in the region. In light of the fact that Kazakhstan’s national Science Fund has recently opened its programmes to the funding of basic research, discussions with this institution were used to address aspects relating to the topic of co-financing. At Nazarbayev University, one of the region’s youngest and most prominent higher education institutions, its President Waqar Akhmad provided an insight into ongoing research activities and expressed support for developing international co-financing programmes, while the broader framework conditions for cooperation with the region were addressed at a meeting with German Ambassador Monika Iwersen. The meetings in Astana were attended by Professor Jörg Bagdahn, President of Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, Vice President of the German Rectors’ Conference (HRK) and spokesperson for the HRK’s group of members of universities of applied sciences (UAS), who had recently opened a branch of Anhalt University in Kazakhstan and was able to lend added weight to the ongoing DFG UDIF-HAW initiative.

In Almaty Vice President Jacobs emphasised the strong German-Kazakh interest in research cooperation in her address to a bilateral conference on sustainability in Central Asia. This conference was organised by the German-Kazakh University (DKU) under its President Professor Wolrad Rommel in cooperation with Ruhr University Bochum and took place at the National Academy of Sciences with more than 300 participants, including a large high-level German delegation of university rectors and prorectors (representing institutions such as Ruhr University Bochum, TU Dortmund University and the University of Duisburg-Essen). At this event, the DFG Vice President held in-depth discussions with the President of the DKU and with the President of the Academy, Professor Akhilbek Kurishbayev. The DFG delegation was also received at Kazakhstan’s largest university, Al-Farabi University, and at the Kazakh-British Technical University, where current DFG funding measures were likewise on the agenda. In addition, the DFG presented its programmes at a German-Kazakh research conference at East Kazakhstan Technical University and visited the Kazakh-German Institute for Science and Technology located there.

In October, the DFG took part in a BMFTR delegation visit to Uzbekistan to present its funding programmes at Innoweek, Central Asia’s largest research and innovation fair, and to strengthen contacts on the ground. This trip also served to prepare a workshop on the topic of One Health in the agricultural sciences, involving Professor Georg Guggenberger (Leibniz University Hannover) in his role as a scientific member of the DFG Senate. Talks on this topic were held with the Vice President of the National Academy of Sciences, Shakhlokho Turdikulova, representatives of the Ministry of Agriculture and other relevant research institutions. Following this, the DFG took advantage of the opportunity to gain an insight into the higher education and research landscape of Turkmenistan for the first time as part of a BMFTR delegation trip with other German research organisations such as the DAAD.

In November, Karin Jacobs and Georg Guggenberger contributed lectures to the First German-Uzbek Universities Forum at the Embassy of Uzbekistan in Berlin, which served primarily as a networking event. In this connection, the DFG Vice President and the DFG Senator held productive bilateral talks with the Uzbek Deputy Minister for Research, Sardor Radjabov, the Uzbek Ambassador Dilshod Akhatov and the Second Secretary, Sherzod Khasanov, in which they explained the measures underpinning the DFG’s enhanced engagement in the Central Asian region.

The DFG’s activities in Central Asia were supported by CASIB, the BMFTR-funded Central Asia Sustainable Innovation Bureau in Almaty. In future, the DFG plans to strengthen its cooperation with the latter’s Director, Dr. Peter Liebelt (Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg): in doing so, the aim is to continue to respond to the needs identified by the research communities in the two countries and address them by means of appropriate funding measures and subject-specific networking initiatives. Shared interest in cooperation was reflected especially strongly this year in the more than 200 posters submitted for the UDIF-HAW networking initiative. These are being made available to participating researchers in the form of a poster book – an initiative that will lay the groundwork for further bilateral cooperation in application-oriented fields.