The structural questions shaping the future of academic mobility in the Turkic world were the focus of a dedicated workshop on the Orhun Process and TURKUNIB, held on 25 June 2025 within the Second Turkic World Summer School hosted by Ibn Haldun University, with the participation of OTS Deputy Secretary General Dr. Mirvokhid Azimov.

The workshop addressed the key challenges confronting the Orhun Exchange Programme and the Turkic Universities Union as they scale up: regulatory alignment among different national higher education systems; the financial frameworks needed to sustain mobility at greater volume; the institutionalization of structures that have until now operated on a rotating, voluntary basis; and the digitalization of processes on which a modern exchange programme depends. Dr. Azimov also delivered an address to the Summer School's participants.

In retrospect, the Istanbul workshop mapped the agenda that would dominate the year that followed. Regulatory alignment, financing, institutionalization and digitalization were precisely the questions taken up by the 8th TURKUNIB General Assembly in Tashkent in October 2025, endorsed at the level of Heads of State in the Gabala Declaration, and carried into implementation through the OTS's recruitment of dedicated experts and the decisions of the 9th Meeting of the Ministers of Education in 2026.

For TURKUNIB member universities, the workshop illustrates how the Union's reform agenda has been built – through sustained expert dialogue linking the OTS Secretariat, universities and young scholars – and signals the practical changes coming to the way inter-university mobility across the Turkic world is organized, funded and administered.

Photo: Organization of Turkic States (turkicstates.org)

Photo: Organization of Turkic States (turkicstates.org)

Photo: Organization of Turkic States (turkicstates.org)

Based on official OTS reporting: Deputy Secretary General of the OTS Participated in Workshop on Orhun Process and TURKUNIB at the Second Turkic World Summer School