Tajikistan’s isolated southeast has benefited from a new trade route to China, but locals say restrictions at the border crossing are making life harder than it needs to be.
Traders in Badakhshan are asking for the border crossing with China to be open more of the time so they can move freely back and forth and generate stronger economic growth in this remote mountain region of Tajikistan.
The Tajik-China trade route, opened in 2004, runs between from Khorog, the administrative centre of Badakhshan province in southeastern Tajikistan, over a high-altitude plateau and then down into China, where it ends in the city of Kashgar, 700 kilometres away.
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Many traders fund their business activities by taking out loans, for example from a microfinance bank branch which the Aga Khan Fund, AKF, has set up in Khorog. The AKF, founded by the Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of the Ismaili branch of Islam, has been a major donor and development agency in Badakhshan, where local people are traditionally Ismaili rather than Sunni as in the rest of Tajikistan.
A delayed return from China can upset a trader’s precarious financial planning.
Ismailimail 