Anastasia Pogorelskaya: Belarus outside the world educational market?

Belarus has been stimulating the export of its higher education services, but the efforts to take part in integration projects for this purpose has brought limited results. The attempts to harmonize higher education systems in the post-Soviet space failed, and the creation of the Central Asian Higher Educational Area in 2021 proves it as well. Despite Belarusian attempts to join the Bologna process current sanctions resulted in this platform becoming inaccessible for the country. Left out of large-scale regional educational initiatives, Belarus will have to look for new opportunities for its educational exports.

Since the mid 2010s Belarus is striving to increase the exports of higher education services. This goal has been declared in the Concepts for the Development of the Export of Educational Services for 2018-2020 and 2022-2025. The country has already succeeded in it. Namely the number of international students in Belarus has increased during 1999-2021 more than 8 times, and their share rose from 0.7% to 6.5%.

However, recent events have significantly shaken Belarusian position at the world market of higher education services...