In the Atyrau region, 300 women have become certified trainers of the international FIRST LEGO League program. They will now be able to teach children engineering and robotics, as well as participate in international grant competitions. The STEM Hanym project was funded by Samruk-Kazyna Trust on behalf of the Samruk-Kazyna JSC group of companies, in partnership with ExxonMobil Kazakhstan, and implemented by the USTEM Foundation.

In total, more than 1,000 women participated in the project and completed online training. They included school teachers, kindergarten educators, 3rd–4th year university students, women with special needs, and mothers raising children with developmental features. The lectures were delivered by founders of successful IT startups and winners of international STEM competitions. Further, for 300 participants who passed the testing stage, hackathons were organized in the Makat, Makhambet, and Kurmangazy districts, as well as in the cities of Kulsary and Atyrau. During the hands-on hackathons, participants learned to work with LEGO Education kits, practiced robot programming, team collaboration, and solving real-world tasks.

Certificates of STEM trainers, diplomas for the best hackathon teams, and awards for the most active participants on social media were presented at the final STEM Hanym Forum in Atyrau, where the results of the pilot project were summarized.

“The ‘STEM Hanym’ project has become one of the key educational initiatives we implemented this year. By investing in the education of hundreds of women, we are essentially contributing to the future of thousands of children in the Atyrau region. We are pleased to see strong interest in this project both from young professionals and from experienced teachers. I am confident that the knowledge gained will help educators not only deliver new information but also implement advanced teaching practices in real classrooms, transforming the learning process,”
said Gibrat Auganov, Managing Director of Samruk-Kazyna JSC.

“I am a teacher with more than 15 years of experience. At first, I hesitated to join, thinking such programs were mainly for young specialists. But from the very first lecture, I was genuinely inspired. Our team was diverse: it included experienced teachers, students, teachers from remote villages, and colleagues from the regional center. We strengthened our competencies with a completely new and highly demanded skill, and now we will be able to apply this knowledge when working with children,”
shared one of the project participants, Anurgul Duisenbayeva.

It should be noted that since 2020, Samruk-Kazyna Trust, on behalf of the Samruk-Kazyna JSC group of companies, has implemented 27 social projects totaling 10.8 billion tenge in the Atyrau region.