SEOUL, September 14 (AJP) - The agency that counts Kazakhstan's people, prices and harvests signed an agreement Monday to rebuild how it does that work with South Korean help, putting artificial intelligence and government administrative records at the center of the effort.
South Korea's Ministry of Data and Statistics (MODS) signed the memorandum of understanding with Kazakhstan's Bureau of National Statistics of the Agency for Strategic Planning and Reforms of the Republic of Kazakhstan at the government complex in Daejeon. Minister Ahn Hyung-jun and the bureau's head, Maksat Turlubayev, attended along with officials from both agencies.
The signing came two days before the first Korea-Central Asia Summit opens in Seoul, and on the same day President Lee Jae Myung began a run of bilateral meetings with the five Central Asian leaders traveling to the capital.
Under the agreement, the two agencies will work together on digitalizing the production of official statistics and share cases in which administrative records, big data and AI have been used to generate them. They also agreed to exchange statistical methodology and to hold training visits, bilateral meetings and seminars.
MODS said it would pass on the innovations South Korea has built into its own statistical system and help Kazakhstan bring its statistics up to international standards.
That alignment has been under way for years. Experts from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Eurostat and the European Free Trade Association have run a global assessment of Kazakhstan's national statistical system, and Turlubayev has represented the bureau at the OECD committee where the heads of national statistical offices meet. MODS took part in that committee's 23rd meeting in Paris in June, where the discussion turned on how the spread of AI is forcing changes in the way statistical quality is managed.
Turlubayev has led the bureau since 2023 and has pushed Kazakhstan's official statistics toward AI and real-time analysis. He holds a master's degree in public administration from Seoul National University and began his career in Kazakhstan's economy ministry in 2008.
In 2025 the bureau started using anonymized mobile operator records to track tourist movement, which it said made Kazakhstan the first country in the Commonwealth of Independent States to fold telecom data into official tourism figures.
What South Korea brings is a statistical system built largely on records the government already holds, including a register-based census that leans on administrative data rather than door-to-door enumeration alone. Ahn has said the ministry is now building metadata that AI systems can read directly and introducing homomorphic encryption and synthetic data so analysts can work with sensitive records without exposing them.
Ahn, who has led the ministry since it was elevated to report directly to the prime minister in October 2025, said the memorandum develops cooperation between the two countries into "tangible results in the data and statistics field."
Kazakhstan is the third Central Asian statistical office to sign such an agreement with South Korea. Cooperation with Uzbekistan dates to a memorandum signed in 2011, followed by annual bilateral meetings, and MODS signed a similar agreement with the National Statistical Committee of the Kyrgyz Republic at the same Daejeon complex in August 2025. MODS said it is also working with the Asian Development Bank on development assistance aimed at strengthening statistical capacity across the region.
The summit runs Sept. 16 and 17, weighted toward critical minerals, energy and supply chains, with AI, digital cooperation, climate response and water management added to a framework that has run at ministerial level since 2007.
Turlubayev said Kazakhstan rates South Korea's record in building official statistics highly, and that he expected the memorandum to widen "practical cooperation" between the two agencies on data use and the development of statistical systems.
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