Author: Malika Ismoilova

Batyr Ikramjanovich Rakhimov, founder of Kapitalbank and former Pakhtakor FC president, was elected chairman of the Uzbekistan Tennis Federation on 17 February 2025, adding a prominent sporting role to a business portfolio spanning finance, insurance, construction and food production—and raising standard governance questions about elite network concentration in Uzbek sport administration.

The number of people living in acute multidimensional poverty has reached 1.2 billion — a rise of 51.5 million and the first increase recorded since the Global MPI was launched in 2010. A new UNDP and Oxford University report finds that more than half of those affected are children, and that regional neighbour Tajikistan is among the few countries to have cut both poverty rates and total numbers of deprived people.

Uzbekistan has quietly built one of Central Asia’s largest rosters of naturalized Russian athletes, spanning rowing, tennis, figure skating, swimming and fencing. The strategy delivers medals but raises hard questions about what it costs domestic talent and the sports budgets meant to develop it.

The Migration Agency under the Cabinet of Ministers has urged Uzbek citizens engaged in temporary labor activity in Russia to regularize their legal status no later than September 10, 2025, following a decree by the President of the Russian Federation extending the original deadline.

An expanded presidential meeting on October 27 set a GDP target of $135 billion and ordered a new budget monitoring system for 22 ministries and local administrations, as the economy grew 7.6% in the first nine months of the year — well ahead of forecast.

A joint study by UNDP and the Anti-Corruption Agency, presented at a Tashkent roundtable on 25 May 2026, found that healthcare and education are the sectors where women are most exposed to corruption, while nearly 70% of respondents linked informal social practices to the spread of corrupt behaviour.

A regional round table convened in Tashkent on 29 November 2022 brought together police, prosecutors and legal educators from four Central Asian countries to examine how corruption and institutional shortcomings obstruct the protection of women and girls from violence.

Representatives from Uzbekistan and three other Central Asian states travelled to Vienna in July 2022 to study European Union practices in agricultural clustering and Geographical Indications, as the region pushes to raise the commercial value and international recognizability of its farm exports.

The Ministry of Finance and UNDP convened an international forum in Tashkent on 30 August 2022 to assess the expansion of participatory budgeting, after the first 2022 cycle saw 6.7 million citizens vote on more than 69,000 proposals, resulting in 1.2 trillion soums allocated to 2,354 winning projects from district and city budgets.

A large-scale study completed in Nukus on 7 May 2025 has produced two new analytical tools for monitoring dust migration across the Southern Aral Sea region and, for the first time, quantified in digital terms how vegetation cover on the drained sea bed reduces salt removal.

A Visa survey of 249 Uzbek small and medium businesses finds digital payment adoption is now widespread, but only 37% of firms have integrated those payments with broader operational tools — a gap that costs businesses time and limits their access to tailored financial services.

Founded in Uzbekistan in 2015, Bellissimo Pizza has moved from 100 domestic locations to an 11-branch footprint in Kazakhstan within a single year, acquiring the assets of a local Papa John’s franchisee and targeting 200 restaurants across the country by 2030.