Community Entrepreneurship in Central Asia: Learning from the “One Tambon, One Product” Program in the Greater Mekong Subregion

This study is a comparative SWOT analysis of Mongolia’s and Kazakhstan’s respective agricultural products — camel wool and halal-certified lamb meat — against the famed “One Tambon One Product” (OTOP) program implemented in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). For Mongolia, not only has its camel wool gained popularity among apparel manufacturers in coastal China, there has also been hopes to establish wool-processing operations in Mongolia itself. For Kazakhstan, its halallamb industry’s relatively small size signifies substantial growth potential, to the extent that the product may even help reduce the country’s current account deficit.

The GMS and Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation (CAREC) economies are juxtaposed here not only for having comparable states of development but also for their past socialist influence, reliance on state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and generally underdeveloped entrepreneurial flair. Mongolia and Kazakhstan may therefore draw lessons from GMS countries’ growth trajectories and challenges, for example, emulating the GMS’s growing integration with wealthier, more advanced East Asian countries to usher in additional investment, technology, as well as stronger commercial and socioeconomic exchanges. Such are opportunities that international organizations including the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the CAREC Institute can help orchestrate.

The study therefore analyzes not only factors that underlie the OTOP’s critical success but also developmental issues (e.g., rural self-sufficiency, product differentiation, sociocultural preservation, infrastructural deficits, and lack of public-private cooperation), as well as examines OTOP’s adaptability/replicability in Mongolia and Kazakhstan, thereby illustrating how OTOP may be relevant and impactful to the CAREC 2030 vision. As the analysis shows, much hinges on place-specific factors, so policies that may best facilitate industrial and economic growth, suggested herein, include: consistent, steadfast leadership at both national and local levels; properly planned and executed incentivization (e.g., star-rating and product certification, in particular, GI certification); and increased private-sector participation to encourage sustainable, bottom-up entrepreneurship.