DUSHANBE, April 3, Asia-Plus — On Monday April 2, a grant agreement for $8 million was signed in Dushanbe by Tajik Finance Minister Safarali Najmuddinov and Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) Country Director Rudolf Schoch.
According to the Ministry of Finance (MoF), the grant provided by the Swiss Government through its Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) for co-financing the Energy Reduction Project in Tajikistan.
The source at a MoF said that the project is aimed at helping reduce commercial losses in Tajikistan’s electricity and gas systems and lay the foundation for improvements in the financial viability of the electricity and gas utilities, in a manner that will take into account the interests of all of the country’s population groups.
The grant awarded by the Swiss Government will go to supplying and installing electricity and gas meters and computerized billing systems.
The project will also support capacity building and technical assistance to the relevant energy utilities, and to the government for the implementation of energy tariff and social protection policies. It will also help to streamline the interaction between energy consumers and the government’s agencies involved in the regulation of energy supply.
We will recall that World Bank’s Board of Executive Directors approved the project in 2005. A total project cost is $30 million. It is funded by the World Bank in an amount of $18 million, of which $15 million is a credit of the International Development Association (IDA) and US$3 million is an IDA grant. The Swiss Government, through its Secretariat for Economic Cooperation (SECO), co-finances the project with a grant in the amount of $8 million. A share of Tajikistan in the project is $4 million.
Tajikistan government has adopted a two-track strategy, comprised of a series of policy and investment measures, for the development of the country’s energy sector aimed at realizing the potential it has in contributing to economic growth as well as to poverty reduction. The first track of this strategy is aimed at the economic and physical recovery of the domestic energy sector, and the second track at making the most of the export potential of the electricity sector.
