About us

Finland’s development policy includes a special Institutional Cooperation Instrument (ICI) that supports cooperation between public sector organizations in Finland and developing countries. Within the framework of the ICI, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland decided in 2009 to support the development of the geosciences information management in Central Asian region. This led to the cooperation project managed by the Geological Survey of Finland (GTK) and involving the national geoscientific institutions in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The project was launched in 2011 and since then, GTK has cooperation between Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

GTK serves as the national geoscientific information centre in Finland and participates actively in international research and development work. GTK is a governmental agency of Finland’s Ministry of Employment and the Economy. The operating idea is to produce and disseminate geological information for industry and society to promote systematic and sustainable use of geological resources and the national geological endowment (www.gtk.fi).

The GTK projects in Central Asia aim at strengthening the institutional capacity of local geoscientific institutions by equipping them with better tools to respond to the various requirements set by the society, other governmental organizations and private companies operating in water, environmental and mining sectors. The largest group of beneficiaries is represented by the society as a whole. Access to proper geoinformation lays the foundation for a considerable part of the use of natural resources (water, soil and minerals) in supporting sustainable development of the economy and prediction of environmental hazards.

The Central Asian Geoportal is an outcome of this cooperation between GTK and the national geoscientific institutions in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. In 2024 Uzbekistan joined the Portal. The Geoportal has been developed in cooperation between experts from all four participating institutions and special teams with appropriate skills have been in charge of the task. Much of the existing geoscientific information has previously been available only as hard copies and therefore much effort has been put on digitizing of old material and certain staff members have been trained for not only digitizing but also for compilation, archiving and storing of metadata. Presently there are special units in each institution working with geoscientific information, its dissemination and modern storage.

The Central Asian geoportal is the property of the four Central Asian countries and GTK’s role is limited to consultancy and technical support. The management of the geoportal is implemented by a team composed of the persons responsible for the nation specific web pages.