Paper abstract:

Due to the tumultuous history of the country as part of the Soviet Union, the modern Kazakhstan is a multi-ethnic and multicultural state. Since gaining independence, the government of the country has been balancing nicely the national identity building with ethnic harmony so far. When the Soviet Union collapsed Kazakhs in Kazakhstan made up only 50% of population (stat.gov). During the 30 years of independence mostly thanks to massive emigration of non-Kazakh population and to the demographic indicators of Slavic vs Asian population the number of Kazakhs this year reached 65% (stat.gov, 2022). It means non-Kazakh ethnic groups represent the third of the country’s population, which makes it important to create such political and socio-economic conditions that would enable equal access to higher education and development of human capital. In addition to the Slavic ethnicities, Uzbeks are the second most populous ethnicity in Kazakhstan, and their numbers are on the rise 2.85% (2009) and 3.18% (2018) from total population. They mostly reside in the southern regions: Turkestan region 93% and Zhambyl region 7% (2018). This research aims to investigate the path to employment of minority ethnic groups using the case of Uzbeks in Kazakhstan. This study intends to gain a better understanding of the role Uzbek’s human capital and social capital in finding employment and choosing the career path and sector of economy. The study has the qualitative research design. Official statistics is used to describe the overall trends on socio-economic indicators for minority ethnic groups. I choose interviews since they are the best way to construct and gain insights into experiences of participants. The interviews will be semi-structured in order to have “a balance between the flexibility of an open-ended interview and the focus of a structured survey” (McCammon, n.d.). The target population of this research are comprised of individuals who identify themselves as ethnic Uzbeks residing in the Turkestan region, who should have more than one-year experience in the labour market at the time of the data collection. I plan to interview around 20-25 participants with equal gender and urban/rural residence distribution to gain insights into the experiences of access to human capital development opportunities and labour market participation.