[Panel] The School on the Silk Road: Demographic Dividend, or Demographic Debt?

Every great city on this road was also a school. Uzbekistan's median age is 27, and a Presidential Decree calls for 5,000 trained fintech professionals by 2030 — but a young population is only an advantage if it's activated. Talent is the input every other pillar depends on: no engineers, no ecosystem; no skilled supervisors, no safe infrastructure. This panel is about building that human capital deliberately — aligning universities, industry-led training and public programmes with what the market actually needs, financing it at scale, and, crucially, keeping the talent in the region once it's trained. The harder questions sit underneath the target: whether a degree still signals fintech-readiness or whether skills-first credentials do, who pays for training at national scale, and how a country turns a demographic bulge into an exportable strength rather than a wave of emigration.