Duration: September 2010 - November 2013

Budget: $26,7000,000

Implementing partner: Chemonics International in partnership with International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC) and Berman Group s.r.o

Key partners: Local, regional, and national government, small and medium entrepreneurs

Geographic location: Kyrgyz Republic

Activity Overview

The USAID Local Development Program (LDP) was a three and a half-year project designed to support local economic development in the Kyrgyz Republic implemented. LDP was designed to create sustainable economic development in the private and public sectors through local, regional and national initiatives. LDP’s technical work included two broad components:

1. Reform Agenda: including activities designed to scale up local level pilot activities in the areas of access to finance, land reform, and tax administration

2. Private Sector Competiveness: focusing on partnerships with growth, particularly in the agricultural and textile sectors.

Activity Focus Areas and Impact

Through its Reform Agenda initiatives, LDP helped to improve the enabling legal framework for the business environment. Target areas for reform included strengthening the national laboratory system to better support the agricultural and textile sectors; promoting land management reform by introducing and advocating for targeted land consolidation and irrigation policies; and introducing new financial instruments such as purchase order financing as a means of increasing access to finance. A significant aspect of LDP’s work had been its support for local and regional guarantee fund institutions throughout the Kyrgyz Republic, including the stewardship of the Law on Guarantee Fund through the Kyrgyz Republic’s Parliamentary process.

LDP’s Private Sector Competiveness activities focused on offering enterprise strengthening support to individual businesses and entrepreneurs, fostering partnerships and connections among business stakeholders, and promoting long-term economic development planning for the Kyrgyz Republic. Enterprise strengthening initiatives focused within the agricultural and textile sectors, and were designed to increase business sales, improve quality standards, support business and strategic planning, and to identify new products and markets. Private sector competiveness programming included support for the development of an overall 20-year National Economic Development Strategy for the Kyrgyz Republic. The economic development strategy initiative has brought together public and private sector stakeholders, and resulted in a final report to be presented to the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic.

Achievements

• Implemented activities across all 7 oblasts; partnered with 54 municipalities to improve their local economic development performance;  conducted program activities in over 70 Kyrgyz municipalities which constitutes the top 70 populated areas of the Kyrgyz Republic

• Provided 69 companies throughout the Kyrgyz Republic with equipment and service support valued in excess of $5.5 million.

• Program efforts in workforce development, conferences, roundtables, domestic study tours, public hearings and learning-by doing pilot program replications increased access to information, knowledge, and skills for more than 120,000 citizens throughout the Kyrgyz Republic.

• Irrigation activities rehabilitated 6 canals benefiting over 15,000 farmers through a revitalization of over 3100 ha of land

• Partnerships with local, regional, and national government partners brought forward 5 new national-level policies and state program recommendations designed to strengthen local economic development

• In that a major constraint to economic growth lies in the challenges in access to finance; as a result of a partnering between the Local Development Program and four municipal working group initiatives; 127 micro and small-sized entrepreneurs received local guarantees that enabled access to capital in excess of $300,000.  A similar partnering between the Local Development Program and four local commercial banks resulted in 6 “purchase order fiancé” short-term working capital loans to Small and Medium Enterprises totaling nearly $4 million

• By the end of the program, USAID funds will have realized a return on investment exceeding $110 million