From Policy Alignment to Digital Trust: Revitalizing the TuCAHEA Legacy in Central Asian Higher Education via Blockchain and AI

The dissolution of the Soviet Union fractured the once-unified educational space of Central Asia, creating severe barriers to student mobility and qualification recognition that persist despite decades of reform. While the EU-funded TuCAHEA project (2012–2015) successfully introduced the "Tuning" methodology to align competence frameworks semantically, this study argues that regional integration has since stalled due to a critical "Implementation Gap." Through a combination of historical policy analysis and Design Science Research (DSR), this paper identifies that the stagnation stems from an infrastructural deficit: the lack of a secure mechanism to operationalize trust in a region characterized by high bureaucratic friction and strict data sovereignty laws. To address this, we propose the "Digital CAHEA" framework, a novel socio-technical architecture designed to transition the region from fragile "soft trust" agreements to robust "algorithmic trust." Specifically, we design a two-layer infrastructure: a Consortium Blockchain (Hyperledger Fabric) to enable immutable, offline-capable credential verification without storing personal data on-chain, and a Federated Learning layer to facilitate regional quality assurance analytics while complying with rigid national data localization mandates. By bridging the gap between higher education policy and distributed ledger technology, this research offers a scalable, sovereignty-preserving roadmap to revitalize the dormant potential of the Central Asian Higher Education Area.