The gSmart project is building upon 10 years of academic collaboration with universities from the Central Asia region. Experience from prior initiatives has helped to identify deficiencies like:

• low number of teachers qualified to teach digital methods and techniques in general, and specifically in the spatial sciences,

• lack of academic international-level methodology competences in graduates, applicable across all the above mentioned disciplines and

• largely missing R&D capacities to translate established knowledge into progress towards spatial organisation and management of societies as well as infrastructure.