Every year, citizens of Kazakhstan are increasingly mired in debt. To date, the total amount of loans provided to individuals in Kazakhstan has reached 18 trillion tenge, though it stood at 5 trillion tenge in early 2021.
This means that the total amount of loans has increased by 3.5 times over 3 years. Vice Speaker of Parliament of Kazakhstan Dania Yespaeva made this statement in an interview with the YouTube podcast Aq jol time with Meruert Kazbekova. She noted that every sixtieth citizen has debts which have been unpaid for more than 90 days, and the amount of unsecured consumer loans has tripled over the past 2 years.
The parliamentarian added that citizens have to take out new loans to repay old ones. The banks are partly to blame for this situation.
The annual effective interest rate on consumer loans is 56 percent and on microfinance loans — over 1,000 percent. Parliamentarians, including Daniya Yespaeva, are working on a new law to protect the rights of borrowers, which provides for a decrease in interest rate.
