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President Shavkat Mirziyoyev convened an open dialogue with Uzbekistan’s youth at the Kuksaroy Residence on Monday, connecting via video link with more than 60,000 young representatives gathered in studios across the Republic of Karakalpakstan, all regions of the country, and Tashkent city. Addressing what he described as the country’s 22 million young citizens, Mirziyoyev framed the younger generation as a formidable “economic, social, and political power” and placed collective responsibility on the entire chain of state authority — from cabinet ministers and regional governors down to school directors — to ensure no young person is left without support.
The centrepiece of the new directives is the designation of every Thursday as “Youth Day” across all ministries, agencies, and regional administrations. Under the mandate, responsible officials are required on those days to leave their offices and visit mahallas, schools, and technical colleges to hear concerns directly from young people. Governors have been separately tasked with developing youth-oriented trade and service projects, providing grants for startups, and organising competitions to identify the best young farmers, industrialists, and creators in their regions.
A record cited, a benchmark set
Mirziyoyev used the occasion to catalogue what he presented as measurable gains by Uzbek youth in recent years. Students have won 66 gold, 147 silver, and 221 bronze medals at international science Olympiads. More than 500 Uzbek students are currently enrolled at Ivy League universities — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Cornell — while over 3,500 are studying at institutions ranked in the global top 100. In sport, young athletes have accumulated 720 gold, 671 silver, and 854 bronze medals in international competition.
On the entrepreneurial side, the president said 63 startup projects launched by Uzbek youth have entered international markets, including in the United States, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the UAE, and that young entrepreneurs now account for 35 percent of the country’s business sector. “It brings us great pride that Uzbekistan has been declared the fastest-growing country in the Global Youth Development Index,” Mirziyoyev said during the event.
Tashkent to host global youth forums
The president announced that Tashkent will become the headquarters of the Global Youth Movement for Peace later this year. Uzbekistan is also set to host the 12th Global Conference of Young Parliamentarians in Samarkand and the “Take Off” International Startup Summit, though specific dates for those events were not given in the president’s remarks.
Mirziyoyev framed the new institutional requirements — the weekly field visits, the governor-level grant programmes, the startup competitions — as a response to what he called emerging global threats to the mindset of the younger generation, signalling that the administration views youth engagement as a matter requiring structured, recurring state attention rather than periodic campaigns. The president called for a more rigorous approach to language learning, vocational training, sports development, and the incubation of innovative startups, without specifying new budget allocations for those areas.