Uzbekistan¹ (population 26.01 million people)² is a country in Central Asia that occupies 447,400 sq km.³ Uzbekistan is a doubly landlocked country; four other landlocked former Soviet republics – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan – surround Uzbekistan’s sandy deserts, dunes and river valleys to the north, east and west respectively. On the south Uzbekistan shares a border with Afghanistan, while to the north it borders the southern portion of the Aral Sea. The vast majority (74.3%) speak Uzbek, the state language of the Republic of Uzbekistan, but Russian is used extensively within urban centres and in business correspondence.⁴ Tashkent is the nation’s capital and, with a population of 2.5 million, the largest city in Central Asia.⁵

According to the United Nations human development index (HDI), Uzbekistan is ranked 111/177 countries worldwide (value 0.694).⁶ This places Uzbekistan in the group of countries with medium human development.