On 24 June 2021 the American Foreign Policy Council convened the fourth panel of eCAMCA — the virtual edition of the CAMCA Regional Forum during the pandemic — to ask a single question: «Will a new entrepreneurial class drive CAMCA economies?» CAMCA is the ten-country footprint AFPC’s regional programme covers: Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Aziz Soltobaev joined the panel as founder of KG Labs Public Foundation and CAMCA Network member from Kyrgyzstan.
The framing AFPC supplied was direct. «Despite many challenges, the economies of CAMCA countries grew significantly in the decades preceding the COVID-19 pandemic,» the panel description ran, and «the region’s rising entrepreneurial class is bound to play an increasingly important role in the economic development of their countries.» The two questions handed to the panel followed from that: What will facilitate the process of private sector growth? What will be the major impediments?
The panel itself was built to answer those questions from operator-level seats rather than from policy seats. Valeri Chekheria came as a serial entrepreneur and hotelier — founder and CEO of Hospitality Projects, and adviser to Georgia’s Minister of Economy and Sustainable Development; Abdullo Kurbanov as co-founder and CEO of Alif Bank, one of Tajikistan’s most-cited digital-finance success stories; Khulan Davaadorj as founder, director and chief technologist of LHAMOUR LLC, Mongolia’s natural-products brand built into a regional consumer business; Aziz Soltobaev as founder of KG Labs from Kyrgyzstan; and Abdulahad Badghisi as general manager of the Samarkand Bukhara Silk Carpet JV. Zabihullah Ziarmal — Director General of the Afghanistan National Standard Authority and Chairman of the World Trade Centre Kabul — moderated. Five founders and operators, one regulator-in-the-chair, one question.
Four years later, in June 2025, the same forum reconvened in person in Ulaanbaatar, where Aziz moderated the plenary on the geopolitical implications of AI models for the CAMCA region. Read as a pair, the 2021 panel and the 2025 plenary track the same question from two ends of the post-pandemic period: in 2021, whether the region’s entrepreneurial class would be the engine; by 2025, whether the geopolitics of compute would let that engine keep running.
Recording of eCAMCA 2021 Panel 4, hosted by the American Foreign Policy Council, 24 June 2021.
Panel Details
| Forum | eCAMCA 2021 — virtual edition of the CAMCA Regional Forum |
| Panel | Panel 4 — Will a New Entrepreneurial Class Drive CAMCA Economies? |
| Host | American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) |
| Date | 24 June 2021 |
| Format | Virtual (pandemic edition) |
| Region | CAMCA — Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan |
| Moderator | Zabihullah Ziarmal — Director General, Afghanistan National Standard Authority; Chairman, World Trade Centre Kabul Afghanistan; CAMCA Network Member |
| Panellists |
Valeri Chekheria — Serial entrepreneur and hotelier; Founder and CEO, Hospitality Projects; Adviser to the Minister of Economy and Sustainable Development of Georgia Abdullo Kurbanov — Co-founder and CEO, Alif Bank; CAMCA Network Member, Tajikistan Khulan Davaadorj — Founder, Director and Chief Technologist, LHAMOUR LLC; CAMCA Network Member, Mongolia Aziz Soltobaev — Founder, KG Labs Public Foundation; CAMCA Network Member, Kyrgyzstan Abdulahad Badghisi — General Manager, Samarkand Bukhara Silk Carpet JV |
| Recording | youtube.com/watch?v=4CRjtgMHtyQ |
| Event page | afpc.org — 2021 eCAMCA Panel 4 |
| Companion post | CAMCA Regional Forum 2025 — Geopolitical Implications of AI Models (Ulaanbaatar, June 2025) |
Substance of the panel discussion itself is not transcribed in this post body. Quoted framing text drawn from the AFPC event page.