Uzbekistan Country Gender Assessment: Update

Key Gender Equality Issues

From a gender perspective, real estate loan and housing ownership issues continue to be a challenge. pCB statistics indicate that most home owners are men, compared with to less than two-thirds of women who borrow to pay for real estate.¹⁴² Social and gender surveys bring out several reasons why men make up the majority of home owners.¹⁴³

Gender stereotypes have a significant impact on home ownership. as main breadwinners in the traditional family model, men are considered heads of their households and owners of real estate. Registering property in their name is a sign of respect from the women.

Women do participate in mortgage decisions, usually within a larger or extended family, but mainly with the husband’s parents. to secure a loan, a woman must have her own assets. But even then, she will not decide independently, without discussing the matter beforehand with her husband and getting his consent, and without involving her parents-in-law. Given the increasingly tough competition for housing loans, however, a quota for women could make husbands and mothers-in-law more willing to see the brides as borrowers.

Resources to cover the mortgage down payment usually come from the cumulative family budget, the sale of family livestock, or, less often, loans obtained from banks or from relatives or friends. Very rarely are the funds sourced from the married woman’s parents or family.

Other barriers to women’s home ownership are as follows:

• 
  fear of nonperforming credit related to prospective maternity leave;
  
• 
  underemployment of women, whose salaries are insufficient for creditworthiness;
  
• 
  lack of information about the 30% quota for targeted female borrowers;
  

¹⁴² adB. 2014–2015. Uzbekistan: Housing for Integrated Rural Development Program. Gap progress reports. Uzbekistan Resident. Mission.
¹⁴³ adB. 2016. Uzbekistan: Housing for Integrated Rural Development Program. Social and Gender Survey. Uzbekistan Resident. Mission.
48 Uzbekistan Country Gender Assessment Update

• 
  lack of knowledge about banking systems and skills to work with banking “documentation (women who register loans in their own name often rely on their husbands to help them prepare the loan documentation and, further, and to manage and file the payments); and
  
• 
  co-signing of the average HIRdIp loan by both spouses (as borrower and
  

co-borrower), with equal rights and responsibilities. However, there are formal impediments to joint registration of real estate (footnote 145).

5.