TASHKENT

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is strengthening its support for green innovation in Uzbekistan by extending a $10 million loan to the country’s largest private lender Hamkorbank.

The financing will help domestic small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which are responsible for at least 56 percent of Uzbekistan’s GDP, invest in green technologies. The funds will be provided under the EBRD’s Green Economy Financing Facility (GEFF) launched in Uzbekistan in 2019 to support green finance.

Hamkorbank is the third financial institution in the country to join the facility that is supported by grants from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Finance and the TaiwanBusiness-EBRD Technical Cooperation Fund. International consultants, to be selected under the GEFF, will help Hamkorbank develop a portfolio of eligible projects and work with borrowers to assist with their green transformation.

The main areas of Hamkorbank’s activities include lending to Uzbekistan’s real sector and financing the technical and technological modernisation projects in order to promote the production of competitive products and to create new jobs. Financial support provided for small businesses and for private entrepreneurship is one of the key areas of the bank’s activities.

The GEFF is fully in line with the Bank’s target of making half of its annual investment green by 2025 and compliant with the goals of the Paris Agreement by early 2023.

The GEFF programme is part of the Bank’s Green Economy Transition approach. It operates through a network of more than 150 local financial institutions across 27 countries, supported by around 5 billion euros of EBRD finance. To date, more than 200,000 GEFF investments have collectively helped avoid annual CO2 emissions of approximately nine million tonnes.

To date, the EBRD has invested almost 2.7 billion euros in 104 projects in Uzbekistan.

Earlier this year, the EBRD also provided another Uzbek bank, Uzpromstroybank, with a $45 million loan to expand its Green Economy Financing Facility, launched in Uzbekistan in 2019, to support green finance for small private-sector companies investing in green technology solutions. The loan will also help the bank in lending to domestic SMEs willing to invest in climate mitigation and adaptation technologies and services.