In a Kazakh Nursery, Five Cribs and No Babies. The State Pays $10,000 Each.

Assel Kurmanova's nursery occupies the ground floor of a concrete apartment block on the eastern edge of Almaty, where the city gives way to the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains. On a Tuesday morning in March, I count five wooden cribs arranged against the far wall of the main room, each painted in pastel yellow and green. Four are empty. In the fifth, a nine-month-old boy named Timur sleeps under a hand-knitted blanket. Kurmanova, who is fifty-two and has operated this nursery for fourteen years, tells me she has capacity for eighteen children under the age of three. She currently has six enrolled. Last year she had eleven. The year before that, fourteen.

"The mothers call me," she says, standing by the window where morning light catches the dust. "They ask about rates, about hours. Then they say they will think about it. They don't call back." She pauses, then adds: "They are not having the babies."

Kazakhstan's fertility rate — the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime — stood at 2.6 in 2025, according to the United Nations Population Division. In 1990, at the end of the Soviet era, it was 4.5. The replacement rate, the level needed to maintain a stable population without immigration, is 2.1. Kazakhstan is below it, and falling. The country's population of nineteen million is projected to peak in 2034 and then begin a long, accelerating decline. By 2050, the median age will be forty-four, up from thirty-one today. The demographic pyramid — broad at the base, narrow at the top — is inverting.

The government knows this. Since 2021, under President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Kazakhstan has implemented one of the world's most aggressive pro-natalist policies. Mothers who give birth to a third child receive a lump-sum payment of 2.5 million tenge — approximately $10,000 at current exchange rates, or roughly half the median annual household income. There are additional monthly child allowances, subsidised housing loans for families with three or more children, extended paid maternity leave, and a nationwide network of state-funded fertility clinics. The 2024 budget allocated $1.8 billion to these programmes, according to the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection. It is demographic engineering on a scale not seen in the former Soviet Union since the 1980s.

It is not working.

The Pension That Costs More Than It Pays

I meet Kurmanova again three days later, this time at her apartment in the same building where her nursery operates. She lives alone. Her husband died in 2019; her two daughters, both in their late twenties, have moved to Nur-Sultan, the capital, for work. She shows me a manila folder containing printouts from the Unified Accumulative Pension Fund, the mandatory state pension system introduced in 1998. According to the most recent statement, dated January 2026, her accumulated balance is 4.2 million tenge — about $9,400. She has been contributing for twenty-seven years.

"When I retire, they will pay me maybe 80,000 tenge a month," she says. That is about $180. "Rent for this apartment is 120,000. So I will work until I cannot." She is entitled to retire at fifty-eight and six months, under the phased pension-age increase introduced in 2018. That gives her six years. "But who will pay for my life?"

The mathematics are simple and merciless. In 1990, Kazakhstan had eight working-age adults for every person over sixty-five. Today it has eight. By 2050, it will have three. The current pension system was designed for a young population with high birth rates. That population no longer exists. The government has three options: raise taxes on a shrinking workforce, cut benefits to a growing cohort of elderly voters, or import young workers from abroad. It is attempting all three, and none are politically sustainable.

Kurmanova does not speak in these terms. She speaks about her daughters. "My eldest, Aigerim, she is twenty-nine. She works in a bank. She has a degree. She earns good money, by Kazakh standards — maybe 400,000 tenge a month. She has a boyfriend. I ask her when they will marry, when I will have grandchildren. She says maybe in a few years. Maybe. But she is twenty-nine. In my generation, by twenty-nine you had three children already."

I ask if Aigerim has mentioned the government's baby bonus. Kurmanova laughs — a short, bitter sound. "She knows about it. Everyone knows. Ten thousand dollars for a third child. But who can afford a first?"

The Cost of Becoming Middle Class

I meet Aigerim Kurmanova at a café in Almaty's financial district on a Thursday afternoon. She is precise, articulate, and visibly uncomfortable discussing her reproductive choices with a foreign journalist. But she agreed to the meeting, she says, because "people need to understand why we are not having children. The government thinks it is about money. It is not about money."

She works as a credit analyst at Halyk Bank, Kazakhstan's largest financial institution. Her boyfriend, Daniar, is a software developer at a Turkish-owned tech firm. Combined, they earn about 900,000 tenge a month — roughly $2,000, which places them comfortably in Kazakhstan's upper-middle class. They rent a two-bedroom apartment for 250,000 tenge. They both have car loans. They are saving for a down payment on a flat, which in Almaty requires at least $30,000 for anything habitable in a safe neighbourhood.

"If I have a child now," she says, "I stop working for at least a year. Maternity leave is paid, yes, but it is not my full salary. It is maybe 60 percent. Daniar's income alone cannot cover rent, loans, and a baby. So we delay. We say, in two years. Then in two years we say, in two more years. And then I am thirty-five, and the doctors say it is high-risk, and we think maybe we just won't."

This is the paradox that pro-natalist policies in middle-income countries consistently fail to resolve. The women most responsive to financial incentives — those in rural areas, with lower education levels and traditional family structures — already have higher fertility rates. The women whose fertility has collapsed — urban, educated, employed — are not making reproductive decisions based on lump-sum payments. They are making them based on opportunity costs, housing affordability, childcare availability, and the incompatibility of professional careers with the demands of early motherhood in a society that still expects women to be primary caregivers.

A 2023 study by sociologists at Nazarbayev University surveyed 2,400 women aged twenty-five to forty in Kazakhstan's three largest cities. Among those with university degrees, the average desired family size was 1.8 children. The average actual family size was 1.2. When asked what policy would most increase their likelihood of having children, the most common answer was not cash payments but subsidised, high-quality childcare available from age six months. The second most common answer was enforceable workplace protections against pregnancy discrimination. The third was affordable housing within commuting distance of employment hubs.

None of these feature prominently in Kazakhstan's pro-natalist strategy. The government has focused on direct financial transfers — the most visible, politically popular intervention — while underinvesting in the structural supports that longitudinal research from Scandinavia, France, and South Korea suggests actually correlate with sustained fertility increases. Kazakhstan has 1.2 public childcare places per hundred children under three, according to UNICEF's 2025 Central Asia report. France has eighteen.

The Village That Sent Its Youth Away

Four hours south of Almaty, in the Zhambyl Province, I visit the village of Korday, population 3,200 and falling. It sits in a valley between low, arid hills, connected to the regional capital by a two-lane highway that floods in spring. The village has a school, a clinic, a mosque, and a central square with a faded Soviet-era monument to workers of the collective farm that once employed most of the adult population. The collective dissolved in 1997. The land was privatised. Most of it is now owned by a commercial agribusiness based in Nur-Sultan. Employment in Korday consists of seasonal agricultural labour, small-scale livestock farming, and government jobs — teachers, nurses, postal workers.

I meet Murat Sadykov, the village elder, in his office behind the municipal building. He is sixty-seven, a former agronomist, and he has lived in Korday his entire life. On his wall is a hand-drawn chart tracking the village's population since 1989. In that year, Korday had 4,800 residents. The line declines steadily: 4,200 in 2000, 3,800 in 2010, 3,400 in 2020, 3,200 today. Sadykov traces the line with his finger. "This is the young people leaving," he says. "Every year, the students finish school. Every year, they go to Taraz, to Shymkent, to Almaty. They do not come back."

The school, built in 1976 for 600 students, currently enrolls 180. The clinic has one doctor, who is sixty-three and has been trying to retire for four years; the regional health authority cannot find a replacement willing to work in Korday. The mosque, renovated in 2018 with funding from a Turkish Islamic charity, holds Friday prayers attended mostly by men over fifty. Sadykov estimates that 70 percent of Korday's population is over forty-five. The median age is fifty-one.

"The government says they will pay for babies," Sadykov says. "But the babies are born in the cities now. The girls who grow up here, they leave at eighteen. They study, they work, they marry city boys. They have one child, maybe two, in an apartment in Almaty. That child will never see Korday. So where does the money go? To people who already live in places where the economy works. The villages die anyway."

This is the second paradox. Kazakhstan's fertility crisis is not evenly distributed. Rural areas still have birth rates near replacement level. But rural areas are depopulating through migration, and the migrants, once urbanised, adopt the reproductive patterns of their new context. The national fertility rate is a weighted average of high-fertility villages that are losing population and low-fertility cities that are gaining it. The result is a demographic sinkhole: the places where people want to have children are the places people leave, and the places where people move are the places where they stop having children.

What the Demographers Know

Back in Almaty, I meet Dr. Saule Akhmetova, a demographer at the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies, a government think tank that advises the Ministry of Labour. Her office, on the eighth floor of a glass tower in the new financial district, overlooks the construction site for a new metro line that has been under development since 2017. She tells me that every pro-natalist measure currently in force was designed by her team or by consultants they hired from Hungary and Singapore, two countries that have pursued aggressive demographic interventions.

"We know the policies are not sufficient," she says. "We told the ministry this in 2020, when the programme was being drafted. The cash transfers will produce a small, temporary bump in third births among women who were already planning to have three children. They will not change the decision calculus for women deciding whether to have a first or second child, which is where the fertility decline is actually occurring."

I ask why the government proceeded with a policy its own advisors said would not work. She pauses for what feels like a very long time, then chooses her words carefully. "Because the policies that would work are expensive, slow, and politically complicated. Childcare infrastructure takes years to build. Labour law reform requires confronting powerful employers. Housing subsidies require land-use reform and challenging real estate developers who fund political campaigns. A cash transfer is simple. You announce it, you distribute it, you take credit for doing something. That you have not solved the problem becomes apparent only years later, when the birth rate is still falling. By then, it is the next government's problem."

The evidence supports her pessimism. A 2024 analysis by the Vienna Institute of Demography examined thirty-seven countries that implemented large-scale cash-for-babies programmes between 2000 and 2023. Of those, only four saw sustained fertility increases lasting more than five years: France, Sweden, Estonia, and South Korea. All four paired cash transfers with comprehensive, universal childcare, enforceable parental leave for both parents, and significant housing subsidies for families. The median cost of these programmes, as a share of GDP, was 3.2 percent. Kazakhstan is spending 0.9 percent.

The Migration Solution Nobody Wants to Discuss

There is a third option, and it is the one that demographers mention quietly, off the record, and never in official reports. If Kazakhstan cannot raise its birth rate, it can import young workers. The country already hosts an estimated 2.5 million labour migrants, mostly from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, according to the International Organization for Migration. They work in construction, agriculture, and services — sectors that Kazakhs increasingly refuse to enter. Most are young men who send remittances home. Few bring families. None are offered a pathway to citizenship.

A 2025 policy paper by the Eurasian Development Bank, a multilateral lender based in Almaty, modelled the fiscal impact of liberalising Kazakhstan's immigration and naturalisation laws. If the country admitted 100,000 permanent immigrants annually, with a pathway to citizenship after five years, the pension fund's projected shortfall would shrink by 40 percent by 2050. The immigrants would be net fiscal contributors: they would pay taxes and pension contributions during their working years, and most would not draw pensions until decades later, by which point the demographic crunch would have eased.

The report was never formally released. A source familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly, told me that the Kazakh government requested it be shelved. "They are not going to propose importing Central Asians as future citizens," the source said. "It is political suicide. There is already resentment about migrants taking jobs, driving down wages, changing neighbourhoods. Tokayev's base would revolt."

This is the pattern across the ageing world. Japan, South Korea, Italy, Poland, Hungary — all facing demographic collapse, all ideologically committed to ethnic homogeneity or cultural preservation, all rejecting the immigration levels that would stabilise their populations. They prefer managed decline to demographic replacement. Kazakhstan is no different. The政府府 will spend billions incentivising births that are not happening rather than admit that the solution is already living within its borders, waiting for legal recognition.

The Nursery in Five Years

I return to Assel Kurmanova's nursery on my last day in Almaty. It is late afternoon, and the six children enrolled in her programme have been picked up by their parents or grandparents. The cribs are empty again. She is mopping the floor, slow, methodical strokes across the linoleum. I ask her what she thinks will happen to this place in five years.

"I will close," she says, without looking up. "Maybe in three years, maybe in five. When the last child leaves and no new ones come. I will retire, if I can afford to. If not, I will find other work. Cleaning, maybe. There is always cleaning." She pauses, leaning on the mop handle. "The government keeps saying the birth rate will recover. They say the money will work. I do not think they believe it. I think they know what I know. The young people are gone. They are not coming back. And they are not having babies."

She gestures at the cribs along the wall. "These were full when I started. Fourteen years ago, I had a waiting list. Parents would register before the child was born, to make sure they had a place. Now I call them, I offer discounts, I say I will take the baby at any age. They say thank you, we will think about it. But there is no baby. There will be no baby."

Outside, the light is fading over the mountains. Somewhere in this city, in a government office with air conditioning and newly installed carpet, officials are drafting next year's pro-natalist budget. They will allocate more money for birth bonuses, more subsidies for third children, more public awareness campaigns featuring happy families of four. They will meet their targets, file their reports, and collect their salaries. And the fertility rate will continue to fall, because the crisis they are trying to solve is not a lack of money. It is a world that has made motherhood unaffordable, professionally punishing, and incompatible with the lives that young women have been taught to want. You cannot fix that with a cheque.

Kurmanova locks the nursery door behind me. The hallway is dim and silent. On the wall outside, a faded poster from a 2022 government campaign shows a smiling mother holding a newborn, the slogan printed in Kazakh and Russian: "Children are our future." Someone has drawn a moustache on the baby in blue pen. The future, it seems, has other plans.