In the bank's words, the facility will finance road and rail crossings, digital systems, inspection and screening equipment and harmonised procedures, and will support transport reforms and the small firms that trade across the lines. The proposal document reported by APA this week gives the split: $320 million from ordinary capital, $65 million in concessional loans, $15 million in grants, with about $150 million more sought in co-financing across the participating countries. Single windows and risk management built on artificial intelligence are on the list.
"Borders are not just checkpoints," said Leah Gutierrez, the bank's director general for Central and West Asia, in the release, which describes the crossings as the bottlenecks left on the CAREC corridors. The release's media contact is the bank's mission in Dushanbe.
$400 million is small against the corridors it serves.
That is consistent with the preparation. In early August the bank and Tajikistan's customs service named Fotehobod-Oybek, Sarazm and Navbunyod as the priority projects; Fotehobod-Oybek sits on CAREC Corridor 2 inside the Shymkent-Tashkent-Khujand economic corridor, and the bank's earlier recommendations for it were more lanes, more paved area and a one-stop control in which customs and border checks happen in one place. Pakistan's commerce ministry said in July that it expected a border facility of its own from the same programme.
$400 million is small against the corridors it serves. Bishkek costs the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway alone at about $4.7 billion. The money is aimed at the part of the journey that a new track does not fix: the gate, the lane and the scanner, where the region's freight spends its hours.
The test is the first approval under the facility, capped at $50 million, and the crossing to watch is the Tajik one on the Uzbek border, which the bank has already surveyed.