Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
Impact Report | March 2025
Key partner:
Kolfest: Kyrgyzstan’s international music and arts festival combining experience, education and entertainment. Their aim is to revolutionize recreational travel by providing an avenue for cultural exploration through music, art and nature.
Local lead contact:
Chingiz Batyrbekov, social entrepreneur, co‑founder and CEO of Kolfest
Updates from Bishkek
Kolfest Founder Chingiz Batyrbekov invited to Tallinn Music Week, representing Central Asia on a forum.
Kolfest will produce its first event in Berlin in April followed by an event in London in August 2025
They have received a lot more publicity including from government, more attention in general, more partnership calls, new opportunities but also new challenges
They will not do the usual festival this year, but will instead go around the world making preparations for 2026, making the festival bigger and better, undertaking worldwide business development and developing new partnerships
They are actively working towards working more closely with central government and the tourism sector in particular
2026 will be a big year for tourism in the Kyrgyzstan with several large scale tourism events planned
Several new concerts halls are being built in the country including one big stadium and several smaller concert halls
The government is investing in a lot of things and this includes music – the Ministry of Culture finally received more money than it used to get. Together with the mayor's office, the Ministry of Culture has invested in 3m USD of sound equipment for collective use
Planning is underway for a big World Nomad Games touristic project – where countries come together and compete in nomadic ethnic sport like wrestling and horseback riding in the mountains – in 2026 the World Nomad Games will be hosted in Kyrgyzstan.
Specific impact from MPRN
Moral support and greater understanding of collective global challenges, leading to a new focus on tourism, towards becoming financially sustainable it has been reassuring to know, via international best practice case studies, that other festivals are facing the same challenges – moral, inspirational support has confirmed that the necessary course of action is to finding sustainable solutions is looking for the new and more diverse streams of income, beyond music and culture. As a result, he is now certain about including tourism in the festival – and is actively working on offering tourists before and after packages before and after the festival and throughout the year. Tourists want to come to the country to see mountains and wonderful natural scenery but also increasingly the contemporary arts and music scene.
Kolfest has secured funds and is launching a 10 day creative lab training programme to upskill music and arts curators in Central Asia – funded by the Swiss Embassy’s grant programme in the Central Asia region which has awarded 40,000 USD towards this work. The programme will benefit 30 people from the region, including both theory and practical work, and takes place at the end of April.
Kolfest has actioned several recommendations from the published report – e.g. diversifying their income flows. They have actively started the process of securing investment into purchasing their own plot of land for the festival.
Ongoing engagement with MPRN:
Kolfest remains an active partner in the MPRN network, in particular regularly attending masterclasses and exchanging on the online platform. The recent Tourism masterclass with Music Cities Community has been especially valuable.