Mention to anyone that you are visiting Kazakhstan and they will immediately think of
Borat! However, few people know much about the real country. We are now among them,
as our new client, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), asked
us to travel there to help local businesses gear up for future prosperity and growth.
Picture of students and tutors in Almaty
Kazakhstan is a central Asian republic, formerly part of the USSR. The size of Western Europe – and the ninth
largest country in the world – it has a population of only 15 million people. It is bordered in the East by China
and in the West by the Caspian Sea, a source of oil, gas and prosperity for the country.
Through its Japan-funded Business Advisory Services (BAS) programme, the EBRD employs local consultants to
work with SME organisations to develop their performance and Kazakhstan is one of the countries where this is
taking place.
The EBRD is committed to developing local capability and has asked us to run ‘Train the Trainer’ programmes for its
consultants, to help improve their leadership, development and problem solving skills in the local language. The pilot
course was held in Almaty, Kazakhstan in early February 2008 and was a big success. We hope that several other
courses will now be rolled out across other consultant groups supporting the BAS in Central Asia and elsewhere.
The training was organised in cooperation with the Kazakhstan Association of Certified Management Consultants,
recently admitted as a provisional member of the International Council on Management Consulting Institutes.
Elevation Learning’s International Director, Robert Fonteijn, who is managing this project, comments: “We were
profoundly impressed by the quality of the consultants we met in Almaty, they compare favourably with those
we see on other international courses we run, where English is not participants’ first language.”
Our Colleagues in Kazakhstan
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