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Secondary Education Reforms Will Ease Uzbekistan's Move to Market Economy

Youth in Uzbekistan will enjoy new and modern senior secondary education, as a result of a US$132 million Senior Secondary Education Project for which the Asian Development Bank today approved a US$57 million loan. The remaining US$75 million will be provided by the Government.

The Project supports reforms of senior secondary education (for pupils aged 15-17), that became compulsory in Uzbekistan since 1998. The Project also helps establish a broad-based secondary education system that meets international standards and is flexible, to give broader choices and options of learning to students, and greater flexibility in employment. In the previous system, choices of education and professional directions for each student were limited/constrained.

"Education is one of the country's best long term investments and we especially would like to make high school education available for children in rural areas so they have a greater choice about what they want to do with their lives," says the ADB project officer working on the project.

The immediate goals of the project are to refine and implement the secondary education curriculum, develop an effective management and teaching staff, develop local capacity for producing and acquiring teaching materials, and foster better planning, management and policy development.

The project will develop 45 model schools, providing benefit to 55,000 students. It will also improve the management skills of school directors, staff and policy makers through international training, in-country training, consultants, and policy research activities. Over 3,000 teachers will be trained in new methodologies of classroom instruction.

In addition, the ADB will provide a technical assistance grant of US$1 million to review the system and to establish monitoring and evaluation functions within the Center for Senior Secondary Education.

The ADB loan will come from its ordinary capital resources. It has a term of 25 years, including a grace period of 5 years, with interest determined according to the ADB's pool-based variable lending rate system for US dollar loans. The Ministry of Higher and Senior Secondary Education will be the executing agency for the project.

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