This year marks the 105th anniversary of the founding of modern scientific institutions in Mongolia. For a sector with a century of history behind it, this is a fitting moment to take stock of what has been achieved and to chart a course for the future. Yet for all the milestones worth celebrating, the modernisation of the country’s material base, its laboratories and research equipment, remains stuck in first gear.
It is not only research institutes that are feeling the pinch. Schools and universities tasked with training future engineers, doctors and technologists are themselves short on laboratories, testing environments and basic measuring instruments. Policymakers, scientists and researchers alike speak of building a “knowledge-based economy” and tying the nation’s future to science and innovation. But that vision will remain little more than wishful thinking unless it is backed by sustained investment in basic science and a genuine effort to strengthen research capacity from the ground up.
The countries that have managed to turn research into economic muscle, and to hold their own in education, healthcare, industry and technology, all share one thing in common. A solid research infrastructure underpinning it all. Without that foundation, talk of leapfrogging into high-tech, large-scale innovation is putting the cart before the horse. Strengthening the research base and fixing the chronic shortage of laboratories and equipment is not a nice-to-have. It is the bare minimum.
The scale of the problem becomes clear the moment you step into an ordinary secondary school. Most have just a single room grandly labelled the “physics, chemistry and biology laboratory” and even that is often more name than substance. In many schools in the countryside, and in the ger areas ringing the capital, dedicated laboratories do not exist at all. Where they do, the reagents have long since run dry and the measuring instruments are museum pieces in all but name. Rather than watching a chemical reaction unfold before their own eyes, students are left squinting at textbook diagrams and rote-learning the laws of physics off a blackboard formula. It is science taught at arm’s length, and it shows.
Students who come through this system carry its gaps with them into higher education, and the picture does not improve much once they arrive. At leading institutions such as the National University of Mongolia, the Mongolian University of Life Sciences and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences (MAS), many teaching laboratories are still running on equipment that dates to the Soviet era of the 1980s. Ironically, the newer instruments fare little better in practice: donated or purchased through international projects and programmes, they are often kept firmly under lock and key. Fearful of damaging the few decent devices they have, many instructors demonstrate experiments themselves rather than letting students near the equipment at all, defeating the very purpose the machines were bought for.
Take the “Thermal Power Plant Engineering” program at the Mongolian University of Science and Technology. On paper, it is designed to give students a thorough grounding, both theoretical and practical, in the repair, installation, operation and adjustment of thermal power plant equipment, steam generators, boilers and turbines. In practice, the gap between the syllabus and the classroom tells a different story. “The credit hours allocated to water treatment are minimal, and there are no small-scale filters to demonstrate how the process actually works at laboratory level,” said one 2025 graduate of the program. “Beyond a small furnace used for testing coal combustion in the generator course, there is barely any laboratory equipment to speak of. We can run the calculations on paper, but without a mini-model furnace to test things in practice, there is a lot we simply never learn how to do on the job.”
The story repeats itself in the university’s agricultural and biotechnology laboratories, which lack modern, functioning equipment such as spectrometers and sequencers, tools that are indispensable for soil and plant genetic research. With no means of running this analysis at home, teachers and students are left with little choice but to ship their samples abroad for testing, at considerable expense, according to industry insiders. In short, even the universities charged with training the engineers, physicists, chemists and biotechnologists who are meant to drive the country’s economic future cannot offer them a proper chance to get their hands on modern equipment. So long as research laboratories remain stuck in the past and learning environments continue to fall into disrepair, talk of innovation, high technology and a knowledge-based economy will remain little more than empty slogans.
The country cannot expect to build a knowledge-based economy on a shoestring, nor can it hope to produce a generation of scientists who have never been allowed to run an experiment with their own hands. If the country is serious about competing on the world stage in research and innovation, it will need to roll up its sleeves and start where every scientific tradition begins: in the laboratory.
Funded to survive, not to discover
MAS sits at the heart of all this. It is the institution chiefly responsible for underpinning the economy, industry, biotechnology, geology, national security, language, history and cultural heritage through research, the place where new knowledge, new technologies and the groundwork for future production are meant to be laid down. Put simply, Mongolia’s future competitiveness rests squarely on the quality of the research this institution produces.
And yet, the figures tell a sobering story. In 2025, institutes affiliated with MAS received a combined 53.2 billion MNT from the state budget. At first glance, that sounds like real money. Look closer, though, and the picture changes: 78.6 percent of the total, or 41.8 billion MNT, went on salaries and social insurance contributions alone. Just 2.89 billion MNT, or 5.4 percent of the budget, was set aside for laboratory equipment, tools, routine maintenance and materials. Spread across the sixteen institutes under the academy’s umbrella, that works out to roughly 180 million MNT per institute per year, a sum that would struggle to cover a modest laboratory refit, let alone the purchase of a single complete set of research equipment. Year after year, institutes are left patching up what they already have rather than building anything new. The numbers speak for themselves: the state is barely investing in the development of science at all.
For context, developed countries typically spend somewhere between three and seven percent of GDP on science and research, treating it as a long-term investment rather than a discretionary expense. Mongolia’s figure, by contrast, hovers at a mere 0.2 to 0.4 percent, a gap that puts the country closer to the bottom of the regional pack than anywhere near its stated ambitions. Given how modest and fragile the country’s economy remains, it is fair to say that the funding earmarked for basic research never really gets the chance to go anywhere, and the institutes tasked with carrying it out are left running to stand still. But basic research was never meant to work like a business, where you sink 500 million MNT today and expect a return tomorrow. It is a slow burn by nature, closer to planting a forest than harvesting a crop. It does not take a genius to work out that building a laboratory, assembling a team and producing results that actually matter takes ten to twenty years at the very least, and that no amount of impatience will shorten that timeline.
Misprioritised budget is holding education back
It may seem an unfair comparison to weigh the budget of an entire ministry against that of a single scientific institution. But the state budget, in its own way, is a statement of priorities. It shows, in black and white, which sectors the government considers worth backing. Looking at the numbers for culture, sport and tourism alone, the state allocated 316 billion MNT in 2023, 575 billion MNT in 2024 and 525 billion MNT in 2025. A total of 16 institutes under MASs, which shoulder the bulk of the country’s scientific research, receive a combined 53 billion MNT a year between them, roughly a 10th of what goes to culture alone.
Put that another way: if even a fraction of the money poured into annual festivals and cultural events each year were redirected towards long-term, high-value scientific infrastructure, Mongolia could well afford to build a comprehensive national physics and chemistry research centre. Instead, successive governments and ministries have burned through billions of tugrug on conferences that achieve little beyond filling a schedule, with vast sums disappearing into little more than tea and coffee. Meanwhile, spending on luxury furniture and new vehicles for government agencies runs several times higher than the entire 2.8 billion MNT budget for scientific equipment nationwide.
Taken together, it paints a telling picture. The government is happy to loosen the purse strings for appearances and short-lived spectacle, while the sector that actually underpins the country’s long-term development and economic potential, basic science, is left out in the cold.
Skilled workforce, powered by obsolete equipment
A total of 30 academicians, 19 Doctors of Science (Sc.D) and 280 Doctors of Philosophy (Ph.D) work across the institutes of the MAS. Some 35.7 percent of all scientific staff hold doctoral degrees, and behind them stand 374 master’s students and 196 doctoral students, learning the ropes and conducting research of their own. Many of these researchers earned their qualifications at highly regarded universities abroad. The Institute of Physics and Technology alone counts six academicians and 35 doctors among its staff, and in 2025 they published 387 research papers in journals listed in the World Science Database, 25 of them in leading, internationally influential titles.
Asked about the state and age of the equipment behind this output, Dr B.Baasansuren, Head of the Heavy Quark Research Laboratory at the Institute of Physics and Technology and leader of the LHCb research team, did not mince his words. “A lot of the equipment that has become obsolete and unusable in our field has simply been thrown out. This year, our institute managed to purchase a new Raman spectrometer for 1.3 billion MNT. But since research results depend directly on the calibre of the equipment behind them, the shortage we face is a real obstacle, both to producing research of an international standard and to expanding our collaborations abroad. When it comes to equipment supply, we are running at average, or below average, at best,” he said.
Mongolian researchers pulled in an additional 5.6 billion MNT from foreign projects and programmes last year, along with 14.8 billion MNT from contract work, yet salaries and living conditions across the sector remain grim. It stands to reason that people worrying about rent and grocery bills are not going to wax lyrical about the origins of the universe or the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Talking up the development of science while ignoring the social welfare of the scientists who actually carry it out is, frankly, putting the cart before the horse.
The backwardness of the material base does not stop at the laboratory door, either. It ripples straight through the education system and into the workforce. Because training laboratories are so outdated, students graduate having been drilled in theory but never given the chance to actually handle the equipment they are supposed to master. A weak student, in other words, does not improve simply by finishing the course, they come out the other end an incompetent specialist regardless of how many years they put in. The private sector then pays the price, losing significant time and money retraining these specialists from scratch once they are on the job. As industry figures are quick to point out, science was never meant to be a short-term game. It is a long-term investment, full stop.
At root, many of the pressing problems Mongolia faces today, from import dependence to technological backwardness to a workforce that is simply not up to the job, trace back to years of neglecting basic science. If policymakers and budget-setters are serious about changing course, they will need a change of mindset to match: real, sustained investment in the material base of basic science, and an equipment fleet that is brought up to date without further delay.
