- World Bank approves $250M loan to Uzbekistan to support the EduImkon Program, enhancing student finance access for higher education and TVET.
- The three-year program aims to benefit 600,000 students, with 80% of resources targeting low-income groups and women.
- EduImkon will modernize loan management, improve transparency, align education with labor market needs, and pilot income-contingent repayment schemes.
The World Bank has approved a loan facility worth $250 million to the Republic of Uzbekistan for its support to the EduImkon Program. The three-year program will focus on scaling up equal access to student finance in higher education and TVET. The program will help improve Uzbekistan’s student finance system and thus improve access for about 600,000 young people to loans and gain university education. About 80 percent of the EduImkon Program will be given to low-income people and women.
Uzbekistan boasts a young generation with approximately 10 million young people aged 14-30. Seeing the vital role young people play and understanding that quality education remains an essential factor within it, an active government policy aims at improving access to higher education and TVET. During the recent years, it led to an increase of almost three times as much as the number of HE institutions and an enormous growth rate among youth enrolled within higher education, from 8 percent in 2017 to 48 percent as of 2024. Although there have been some considerable steps made towards easier access to more learning opportunities, it also created a burden on the state-sponsored student loan system.
The current student financing system, which depends on loans provided by commercial banks with government subsidies, experiences some challenges. First, it is not labor market demand-aligned because loans provided for tuition are not biased towards fields that are in high demand, such as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Moreover, even though women make up 55% of university students and 80% of people who receive tuition loans, only 33% of women are pursuing STEM courses, indicating there are gender gaps within vital skills domains. It should be noted that there are no set standards on who should receive loans and who should not because it does not favor everyone equally.
The EduImkon Program, which will be implemented by the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) between 2026 and 2028, will address these systemic issues with a set of specific actions. These actions include developing a roadmap for modernizing student loan management procedures, enhancing cooperation among different Ministries and agencies, and implementing an integrated online platform for easier loan processing and management. The online platform will improve transparency and monitor people who receive loans, and it will also have a comprehensive data analysis tool that will be supportive for allocation decisions.
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The package will also improve access for low-income and women students through better targeting and changes to interest subsidies. It will seek to improve the relevance of education to the labor market, encouraging students to undertake courses that match labor market needs, while at the same time ensuring that there is financial sustainability for the tuition loan program. Income-contingent loans will also be introduced on a pilot basis, with repayments contingent on the graduate’s income after completion, and with a focus on serving low-income earners and unemployed individuals.
At the end of the program in December 2028, it’s anticipated that some 600,000 students will have benefited from the improved financing framework, with tuition loans provided via 12 commercial banks and cooperation with MEF. Going forward, more than $190 million, or approximately 80 percent of program resources, will be dedicated directly to at-risk student populations, with the program set to attract an additional $30 million in private sector investment. Effective alignment with higher ed, TVET, and labor market needs within Uzbekistan will be encouraged.
