Abdul Latif Mansoor, Minister of Energy and Water (MEW), has traveled to Uzbekistan to discuss the extension of the electricity purchase agreement with the neighboring country’s officials.

“You know that we have a contract with Uzbekistan and the electricity supply has been reduced these days. Therefore, we are talking to them to solve this problem and we want to import more electricity to Afghanistan and the trip is for this purpose,” said Mansoor.

Officials from the ministry say that the Islamic Emirate has paid Uzbekistan for electricity and they are hoping Tashkent will increase the amount of electricity exported to Afghanistan.

“In some provinces, including the capital, there is a problem of outage of electricity, and to solve this problem, a delegation from the Ministry of Energy and Water and Da Afghanistan Breshna Company have traveled to Uzbekistan,” said Ghulam Jelani Haq Parast, director of publications of MEW.

Power outages have severely affected manufacturing companies in recent weeks, and business owners have appealed for electricity supply problems to be resolved as soon as possible.

“I hope that the visit of the Minister of Water and Electricity of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan to Uzbekistan will bring results, because Afghanistan’s industries, especially in Kabul, are in a very critical state in terms of outage of electricity,” said Sakhi Ahmad Payman, deputy head of Afghanistan’s Chamber of Industries and Mines.

“Currently, sixty to seventy percent of our factories have stopped [operations],” he added.

Meanwhile, economic experts say that imported electricity has always been a problem for Afghanistan and that the government should invest more in electricity production inside the country.

Afghanistan currently relies on Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran for 70 percent of its electricity, and pays millions of dollars to these countries every year.