Opinion: Uzbekistan’s Growth Story Has a Skills Problem
Uzbekistan has become one of Central Asia's strongest growth stories. GDP expanded by 6.5% in 2024, and the Asian Development Bank projects growth of 6.7% in 2026 and 6.8% in 2027. Industry, services, and foreign investment are all expanding. The World Bank says real GDP growth averaged around 6% a year between 2017 and 2025. Beneath that momentum, however, a quieter problem is taking shape. Uzbekistan may not yet be training enough workers for the economy it is trying to build. The issue is not a shortage of capital; it is a shortage of market-ready skills. The country has moved from an isolated, heavily state-controlled economy toward a more open and reform-driven model in less than a decade. But if education, vocational training, and private-sector demand do not align faster, Uzbekistan risks turning one of the region's strongest demographic advantages into a labor-market strain. A Dividend That Could Become a Deficit Uzbekistan is a young country in every sense. About 700,000 young people enter the job market each year, while the working-age population is expected to keep expanding for decades. In development economics, this kind of demographic concentration is often described as a dividend: a period when a large share of the population is of working age, productive, and capable of driving growth. The risk is that the dividend does not materialize automatically. It depends on whether young people can move into productive, formal, and better-paid work. If the workforce entering the economy is not equipped with the skills employers need, the same demographic pressure can feed into informality, underemployment, migration, and social strain. The official unemployment rate fell to 4.9% in the third quarter of 2025. That is a meaningful improvement. But around 760,000 people remained registered as job seekers, and the International Labour Organization has estimated informal employment at about 40% of the workforce. Remittances also remain a structural pillar of household income: according to Central Bank data cited by local media, inflows reached $18.9 billion in 2025, up from $14.8 billion in 2024. This is not the picture of a country that has already solved its human-capital challenge. It is the picture of a country racing against time. The Mismatch at the Heart of the Problem The core challenge is not a shortage of graduates. Higher education has expanded dramatically. According to Uzbekistan's National Statistics Committee, coverage among 18- to 23-year-olds reached 47.7% at the start of the 2024/2025 academic year, up from 8.3% in 2017. The number of higher education institutions has also grown rapidly. By conventional access metrics, this is an extraordinary achievement. But enrollment alone is not the measure that matters. Employers need workers who can solve practical problems, operate modern equipment, manage digital systems, and adapt quickly to changing production and service needs. Too many students are still moving through programs shaped by an older economic model: credential-heavy, theoretically oriented, and weakly connected to the needs of a modern labor market in IT, manufacturing, logistics, energy, tourism, and services. The student-financing system has...
