OREANDA-NEWS. December 05, 2014. EBRD and KICB, its local partner bank, support expansion of Elnur Dan to Jalalabad
 
A new flour mill will be built in the south of the Kyrgyz Republic thanks to a four-year loan of USD 4 million being provided jointly by the EBRD and the Kyrgyz Investment and Credit Bank (KICB) to Elnur Dan LLC, a private firm established in 2004, which is currently the country’s third largest flour producer and a long-standing client of KICB.
 
Flour is the single most important food for the Kyrgyz Republic’s population of nearly 5.8 million people; 38 per cent of the local diet is based on flour in some form.
 
Elnur Dan’s existing mill on the outskirts of the capital, Bishkek, produces 38,000 tonnes of flour annually and 4,000 tonnes of pasta. The new mill’s equipment is being imported from Turkey and will be built in the country’s most densely populated region, Jalalabad, where 1.1 million people live.
 
At present, the south of the Kyrgyz Republic depends partly on flour supplies from the north of the country. These have to be transported by road, which raises costs for the local population. Elnur Dan’s new mill in the south of the Kyrgyz Republic will have the capacity to produce up to 170 tonnes of flour a day. By comparison, the capacity of the mill in Bishkek is 225 tonnes of flour a day.
 
The loan to Elnur Dan is being made under a special financing facility through which the EBRD and its partner banks can lend together to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
 
Larisa Manastirli, Head of the EBRD office in the Kyrgyz Republic, said: “Supporting small and medium-sized businesses is one of the Bank’s most important priorities in the country. The new production facility in the south of the country will help to create jobs and will make this important food much more accessible to the local population. We are proud to support Elnur Dan together with our partners at KICB. The project will also receive support from the European Union through their Investment Facility for Central Asia (IFCA).”
 
The joint EBRD-EU SME Finance Facility for Central Asia was created in 2012 to support direct lending to SMEs and indirect financing of SMEs via local banks in Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Elnur Dan is one of around 20 projects in Central Asia financed under the joint EBRD-EU programme, to which the European Union’s IFCA has provided EUR11 million of funds for credit enhancement support and technical assistance.