KYRGYZSTAN TODAY Policy briefs on - Department of Geography

Current state of affairs in the sector
Among the numerous ways of describing what is happening in the NGO sector we
are interested in seeing how they are nurturing their links. NGOs relatively recently
started to massively self-reflect on themselves as a sector by holding NGO forums in
April 2005 and summer 2007. The latter especially has focused on issues of internal
cooperation. In a survey conducted in 2006 of NGOs, only 46.9 percent answered “yes”
to the question “whether NGOs are cooperating enough with each other”.
Organizations
Quite a number of organizations are still one-person endeavours and they remain
vulnerable to changes in leadership, which often leads to NGOs ceasing to exist.
Whatever is accumulated by one person – knowledge, skills, and, most importantly,
links – disappears. The above-mentioned survey has identified only five hundred out
of eight thousand NGOs as systematically working and we can imagine that the rest
did not manage to sustain relations beyond one or a handful of founders who did not
think much of their own organization. We can assume that if there are people around
you who remind you of the existence of your organization and the reason why it was
set up, the greater the chances for this organization to exist longer. Besides, individually
run organizations, even those working successfully, tend to produce ambitious leaders,
which is an obstacle to cooperation between NGOs, according to the survey (46 percent
of respondents).
Another issue is project based activities which dominate the life of NGOs, a life
which becomes full of strictly prescribed roles and functions, which enable project
efficiency but disable the smooth and wide engagement of others who are not named in
the initial proposals, so many NGOs are running projects rather than appealing to the
hearts of people to come together to undertake social change.
Organizations and their constituencies
Project based activities have led to NGOs having centralized links with their
constituencies and most either provide services to those whom they see as recipients, or
advocate something aimed at their constituency as enlisted supporters for their cause.
Activities of other types of projects, which enlarge dynamic membership are rare, and
were not viewed until recently as very important.
According to the same survey, 62 percent of NGOs engage volunteers in their
wok, but only 10 percent of these volunteers are professional specialists and the rest
are students, beneficiaries, housewives, etc. Whether this is an issue for citizens of the
country who, because of social, economic and other reasons are not volunteering, or the
inability of NGOs to attract wider and professional membership, is seemingly one of the
major problems.
Organizations and other organizations
Whenever the issue of more formal coordination among NGOs emerges, it’s difficult
to avoid “anti-hierarchical” sentiments by organizations, which fear that “the elite” can
dominate the sector. The low level of trust between NGOs is one the major signs of
the state of affairs of social capital in the NGO sector. According to the same survey,
75 percent of NGOs know about the activities of organizations working on similar
issues at local level and 44 percent know about NGOs working nationally. Hubs of links
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