EBRD provides $ 4 m to back green economy in Tajikistan

27 / 01 / 2021

By Marwa Nassar - -

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has allocated a financing package of $ 4 million to Tajikistan’s largest private lender Bank Eskhata (Eskhata) under its Green Economy Financing Facility (GEFF) to support green financing for households and small private-sector companies investing in green technology solutions.

Households and small and medium-sized enterprises across the country, including in villages and remote rural areas, will benefit from Eskhata’s loans for climate adaptation technologies and services, such as drip irrigation, rainwater harvesting and storage, sustainable land-management solutions, solar panels and energy-efficient cold-storage facilities.

Beneficiaries can identify climate friendly technologies through the Green Technology Selector database, which is supported by the GEFF Tajikistan technical assistance team.

The funding, provided by the EBRD and the Green Climate Fund, will be available in local currency and US dollars in three tranches.

The GEFF is part of the EBRD’s recently announced plan to scale up its climate and environmental finance under the Green Economy Transition (GET) approach, according to which the Bank will aim to increase green financing to more than 50 per cent of its annual investment by 2025 while paying particular attention to gender considerations.

In Tajikistan, the GEFF is supporting equal gender access to green finance and is supported by the European Union, the GCF and South Korea.

The GEFF program operates through a network of more than 145 local financial institutions across 27 countries, supported by more than €4.6 billion of EBRD finance for 190,000 clients to date. These projects have led to annual CO₂ emission reductions of more than 8.6 million tons so far.