16 July 2010

TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN – UNICON shortlisted for Asian Development Bank (ADB) funded project on Capacity Building for Microfinance Development in Uzbekistan.

This project complies with ADB's Country Partnership and Strategy (CPS), which supports sustainable economic growth, poverty reduction, gender development, and its Microfinance Strategy. For rural non farm enterprise development, ADB's CPS encourages forward and backward linkages with the agricultural sector. These linkages would also absorb surplus labor released from agriculture. It also supports the development of rural financial services and promotes more efficient intermediation functions by commercial banks and seeks (by allowing sub-borrowers to draw down their SUM loans in cash if they so choose) to abolish the distinction between cash and non-cash market transactions.

The project's outcome will be to help financially viable sub-borrowers have increased and improved access to bank credit, and thus exploit investment opportunities in Uzbekistan.

The project will allow participating commercial banks (PCBs) to have improved technical appraisal skills to assess sustainable lending to viable MSEs. PCBs will first assess their small and micro-credit appraisal skills, select the staff that will be trained, and communicate the results of the assessment to ADB.

ADB's TA will improve the entrepreneurial capacity of sub-borrowers, especially women, by training them in business plan preparation and credit applications.

The project will also promote an increase in PCBs outstanding loans to financially viable sub-borrowers. PCBs will adapt their systems for credit appraisal, monitoring and recovery, to meet ADB's loan requirements and will market small and microfinance loans after careful scrutiny of sub-borrowers' applications during the implementation period.