KYRGYZSTAN TODAY Policy briefs on - Department of Geography

For a country where the main active population (aged between 15 and 65) constitute
around 60 percent of society, this comes to one NGO per 400 people or one civil society
organization (by broader definition) per 230 people. That ratio would be even smaller
taking into account increasing external migration and, thus, decreasing population. It’s
possible to imagine with such estimates that NGOs can reach out quite easily to other
members of Kyrgyz society with less than 6 degrees of separation 1 , but the number of
organizations actually working constitute only a fraction of those registered.
However, besides sheer numbers, the most important dimension of Kyrgyzstan’s
NGO sector is the quality of its internal relationships. An effective sector could function
properly even in smaller numbers, if relationships between organizations within and
outside the sector were better and more intense. It could function better if we view it the
same way as the human brain when it’s measured not by the number of cells, but by the
synapses among them (a billion cells can potentially produce a number of connections
measured by more than eight hundred digit figure).
And this is only about links between NGOs themselves, not mentioning the way
they connect with other non-profit, private or state partners, and most importantly
with citizenship (e.g. volunteers). That side of the story is more important than internal
relations in the sector. NGOs serve the needs of larger society in various ways of direct
interactions with that society. The strength of these links is, eventually, the power of
the NGO sector – whether NGOs are affecting policies in relation to central and local
governments or by building advocacy coalitions engaging a large numbers of citizens.
NGOs in Kyrgyzstan had, by the late 1990s, started to form coalitions and networks
focused on common issues: election monitoring, children’s welfare or environmental
issues. Some of them were long-term which, led to the creation of formal associations
such as the Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society and some were short-term, aimed
at campaigning on certain legislative changes, like a group of NGOs which worked in
2007 on the Election Code reform.
State and counter-movements
Assertive statehood promoted by the current country leaders, a vision of statehood
where the role of civil society is bleak, at the moment puts the NGO sector in a vulnerable
position. At worst the government is intentionally indifferent to NGOs and, at best, it
does not have a coherent vision on the sector. On the one hand there is a laudable recent
law on social order introduced by the government and adopted by parliament and yet, at
the same time, there is the current draft tax code, which puts NGOs almost on a par with
commercial enterprises. The government should be one of the most interested players
(even if this government evidently does not support liberal views) in developing the social
capital of NGOs from pragmatic, not to mention value-oriented, perspectives alone, to
have, for instance, the means to mobilize human resources for government programmes.
Liberal values, subscribed to in the 1990s by many rhetorically and in considerable
numbers genuinely, are now experiencing problems not only from the state, but from
society at large where traditional and religious sentiments are on the rise. Islamic,
patriarchic, conservative societies are gaining and regaining their positions and for
many liberally oriented NGOs this presents a challenge, which requires new ways of
confronting them and requires innovative ways of working with their constituencies.
1
There were calculations that each person on the planet is separated from anyone else on the earth
through no more than 6 consecutive links of relationship.
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