The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified development challenges and sharpened the view on opportunities to overcome them. Evidently, policymakers were confronted with the healthcare system’s limitations, and the socio-economic impacts from the crisis directed the focus on social assistance, agriculture and food processing, and the need for accelerating reforms necessary to develop more of a partnership with the private sector, Jan-Peter Olters, World Bank Country Manager in Tajikistan, wrote in the following opinion article published on the World Bank’s website.
As a country with a young and growing, largely rural population, with legacy challenges of considerable connectivity constraints, Tajikistan has felt acutely institutional and infrastructure constraints during the partial lockdown and strict travel restrictions, with a growing sense of translating these weaknesses into sources of post-crisis recovery and resilience.