NGO Sector Under Scrutiny

Kyrgyzstan has a large number of non-government organisations or NGOs, but it is estimated that only one in ten is functional and according to NBCentralAsia commentators, the government is not in a position to improve matters.



According to the latest United Nations human development report for Kyrgyzstan, the country has over 11,000 registered NGOs. The document characterises the growth of the NGO sector as “the evolution of civil society”.



It is not clear how many of these NGOs actually function, but NBCentralAsia commentators put the number anywhere between 50 and 1,000, most of them concerned with social issues such as election transparency, youth, pensioners and women.



Tolekan Ismailova, the head of the director of Citizens Against Corruption, a human rights group, says there is no real need to worry about the large number of NGOs in existence, even if an increasing number of them are short-lived affairs set up purely to facilitate money laundering. “Let them exist, alongside those that really are working for the good of the country,” she said. “Everything will sort itself out over time; the ones that came into being articifially will not survive.”



Valentin Bogatyrev, vice-president of the Vostok think tank, thinks that whatever the reason so many NGOs fail to do anything, it is not in the main because they were set up for illegal purposes. “NGOs don’t get special benefits that would make it possible to launder money through them,” he said.



Bogatyrev sees the rise in the number of NGOs as a natural trend, which will soon start declining again without any need for the state to intervene.



Political scientist Tamerlan Ibraimov agrees, saying, “The state should not interfere in the work of NGOs, but if individual members or whole organisation breaks the law, they should be held to account like anyone else.”



(News Briefing Central Asia draws comment and analysis from a broad range of political observers across the region.)