Tajikistan hires UNICEF for $580,230 school connectivity study

Tajikistan's World Bank-financed Digital Foundations Project has signed a $580,230 contract with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) for a feasibility study on connecting schools to the internet, a World Bank contract award notice of 11 September records.

The notice shows the contract was awarded by direct selection, without a competitive tender, by the Project Implementation Center under the Executive Office of the President, and runs for 12 months from a notification of award dated 10 September.

The notice does not say how many schools the study will cover, which regions, or whether it will assess fibre, mobile or satellite links. It gives no reason for the direct selection. The World Bank's procurement record for the contract lists an estimated value of $742,000, so the signed price came in about 22 per cent below the estimate, on Backhaul's arithmetic.

What the project has to deliver

The study feeds a schools target already written into the project. The latest Implementation Status and Results Report, archived on 4 April 2026, sets a goal of 100 digitally enabled schools, "including connected and connected + equipped", by December 2030. It also targets 20,000 people making new use of broadband internet, of whom 10,000 women and 18,000 young people. Every one of those indicators stood at zero on 25 March 2026.

The report rated progress towards the development objective and implementation as moderately satisfactory, down from satisfactory, and said implementation was "progressing slowly". Project indicators "are expected to see only slight improvement through 2026 due to procurement delays", it said. The International Development Association grant had disbursed 9.31 per cent of its revised amount, and a trust fund grant, TF-C6744, 16.67 per cent, the report shows. The project was approved on 17 December 2024, became effective on 8 May 2025 and closes on 13 December 2030, its World Bank project page says.

Beyond schools, the report lists a data centre target of 2.5 MW of added capacity, 30 ministries and agencies co-locating equipment or migrating systems to it, and an approved national digital transformation strategy, all due by December 2030 and all at zero or "No" in March.

Two other awards

The project published two further contract awards in the following weeks, both in the skills component that the schools work sits in. A contract worth TJS 3,113,917.88 went to LLC Center for Artificial Intelligence Development, also by direct selection, to train up to 5,000 computer science teachers to deliver the mandatory "AI and Computer Science" school subject, a notice dated 19 September says. It is financed from the trust fund grant and runs for 12 months.

A third award, for courses in information and communications technology aimed at women, went to LLC Next View Consulting of Dushanbe for TJS 1,899,819.50 after a qualification-based selection, the notice of 7 October shows. The firm scored 90 on the technical evaluation and ranked first. The notification of award for that contract is dated 12 May 2026, nearly five months before the notice was published.

What the notices do not say

None of the three notices states a start date for work in schools or on networks, and none names an operator or infrastructure provider. The UNICEF study is a feasibility exercise: the documents published so far do not say how the project will procure the connections themselves, or whether Tajikistan's state operator or private carriers will supply them. The April report does not break down the 100-school target by connection type.

The next document to read is the project's next Implementation Status and Results Report, the first since the three awards, which should show whether any of the zero indicators has moved.