Empowerment in Kyrgyzstan Who is Giving Back?

September 18, 2013

What is charity? To find the answer to this question we sought out AUCA ’11 alumna Jenny Jie (Ensi Tszie), who has spent her life helping people and organizing youth for social movements and projects.

Jenny was born in China, to a Kyrgyz family. Jenny’s family played the biggest role in stimulating her desire to participate in social activities, such as donating emergency materials or visiting orphanages and elderly centers. After she graduated high school she moved to Kyrgyzstan with her family and entered American University of Central Asia.

“My early education and cultural cultivation was deeply influenced by Chinese philosophy. I remember in my primary school, we used to have a course called “Ideology and Morality”. It was about encouraging young students to take active participation in societal life, such as to help other vulnerable people. So, in my early understanding, doing something good to help others is a rewarded social behavior, and it is the most basic moral good. By Chinese ideology, making a contribution to society is every person’s responsibility,” Jenny said.

After graduating from AUCA, Jenny went to New York to pursue her master’s degree in Social Enterprise Administration at Columbia University. She talks to local young people, and participates in their social activities to learn about the American experience.

“Little by little, I found out that I DISLIKE the word “charity”. In today’s society, the concept of charity has been attached to too many additional indicators (political, social status, power and privilege, commercial) Instead of giving charity, the more urgent need is to empower people! As in our social work mission: to help the people help themselves,” Jenny said.

Jenny, and much of the aid and charity community, is focusing on creating opportunities and empowerment. In order to develop our country and our generation it is not enough to support vulnerable groups of people with money, food, and clothes. It is very important to give them the opportunity to be productive members of society.

Individual Giving

In order to clarify how Kyrgyz citizens understand charity and empowerment, AUCA conducted a small survey. The target group was students and young professionals. The results show that people consider themselves to be very active charity workers. A majority has volunteered with some charity project in the last 12 months, and 62% of respondents say that they have donated money, with approximately half of that group donating more than $100 in the past year. Within those monetary donations, most go towards education and health care, but the survey was not detailed enough to look at the specific programs and whether young donors are discerning when it comes to giving to charities that are truly careful about their mission and programming. When asked why they give, only 2% answered “to empower people”.

“We need real diversity within our charity. For instance, creating hand-made New Year’s cards for elderly people, or people in prison, is good. Providing those same people with free trainings such as computer or internet skills, that would be great. All are parts of different types of donations (time, energy, intelligence, & finance), but we need to think more carefully about how we use each,” Jenny said.

Kyrgyz charity is mostly about money for food and other small nonperishable items. Fewer people are willing to give their time and resources to really think about how to empower the most vulnerable strata of society. 33% of the survey respondents belonged to a charity at the time of the survey. The most popular were Rotaract and Unity Fund.

Jenny and two other AUCA alumni, Karlygach Nurmambetova and Nadia Pak, founded Unity Fund in 2010. The impetus for Unity Fund was the tragic events in Osh, riots and clashes between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan. At the beginning they were a very small group of young people who raised money to purchase medical supplies for the victimized families in the southern regions of Kyrgyzstan. Later, more AUCA students and FLEX alumni joined this small initiative, and after the worst was over, Jennie and her co-founders decided to continue to grow their group.

Unity Fund now creates projects to empower the youth of Kyrgyzstan. For instance, students of AUCA and members of Unity Fund, with the support of Kumtor Operating Company, Global Youth Service, and American Councils, organized a 6-day camp for residents of 3 orphanages in the Chuy region. Based on a merit-based competition, 20 children were invited to join the project Eco-Caravan 2013.

“The main goals of the project were to empower young leaders for our country and ignite the spirit inside of them, so that they can strive to learn more and develop the skills and networks they need to be successful. As a result of their circumstances, underprivileged children are very limited in their ability to make long-term decisions and investments, and often have nobody to guide them to the few opportunities that do exist for them in Kyrgyzstan. They are very dependent on their peers, homes, social norms of their environment, and the government. We tried to prove the opposite. We empowered them through education in three different areas - environment, leadership, and tolerance, and also by providing personal examples of success, using the FLEX exchange students and AUCA students from limited means to prove that resources exist.” Nadia Pak said. With the help of this project on empowerment, these children now have the goal to study, and some of the support they need to get there.

Rotaract, a student group supported by the local Rotary Club of Bishkek, was one of the first to be established after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and is today a collection of 25 young students and professionals who try to look at charity locally and internationally. Rotaract provides the opportunity for young men and women to enhance their knowledge and skills, and assist them in their personal development to address the physical and social needs of their communities. In doing this, they promote better relations between all people worldwide through a framework of friendship and service.

“Rotaract Club gave me great experience in managing projects,conflict resolution, taught me responsibility and leadership, and showed me the world from the side of the less fortunate. It acquainted me with people, who just like me, want to make the world better,” Nursultan Anarbekin (AUCA ’14), the President of Rotaract Club said.

CSR in Kyrgyzstan

The survey covered individual attitudes towards charity, but across the world corporations are by far the largest suppliers of private charity. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become common over the last ten years as corporate profits around the world have severely outpaced wage growth for workers. This trend is quickly coming to Central Asia, where income inequality is more obvious. Though currently there isn’t the same pressure on corporations here as in the West to participate in CSR activities, many businesses are beginning to see the many advantages of actively pursuing a CSR strategy.

According to Mallen Baker, a writer, speaker and strategic advisor on CSR, “CSR has been defined much more in terms of a philanthropic model. Companies make profits, unhindered except by fulfilling their duty to pay taxes. Then they donate a certain share of the profits to charitable causes. It is seen as tainting the act for the company to receive any benefit from the giving.”

In order to understand this in a Central Asian context we met with the marketing department at Beeline, a regional mobile operator, to talk about how they have grown in their CSR mission.

Beeline supports disadvantaged social groups by arranging several types of charity campaigns. Beeline actively supports nursing homes and retired people by giving clothes, furniture, and groceries. The Company also supported the psycho-neurological orphanage in the village of Belovodskoe. Beeline annually holds events for the veterans of the Great Patriotic War, which includes charitable SMS-campaign for Beeline subscribers and free calls for the veterans in different part of the World. These activities are relatively common across all businesses in Bishkek, but Beeline has also developed a new project that does focus on empowerment.

Beeline now provides access to the Internet in rural areas in Kyrgyzstan. The first trial center was established in Bala-Aileuichi village, in the Chuy region, providing a connection to a secondary school and a post office. The centers are used to teach IT lessons to school children. After hours, any villager can come in and browse the Internet, receive e-mail, print a document, make copies and deposit money to their cell phone accounts.

“Socially responsible business is an investment in a stable socio-political and economic outcome in the country where a business develops. This is a long-term investment, which leads to the creation of a favorable social environment and, consequently, obtaining a sustainable profit. That is, social responsible business not only helps to work in the future, it helps businesses realize the need for development, security and stability,” Olesya Kushchenkova, a leading expert of Beeline , said.

Another example of an empowerment-focused organization is Mina Group. This company specializes in commodity trading and full-cycle logistics for delivery of oil products to regions with challenging business and security environments. In Kyrgyzstan, Mina Group is sponsoring high-school students from rural areas, who have an opportunity to study at AUCA’s New Generation Academy program, and then, after passing entrance exams, enter the university and study on full scholarship.

Here we see that strategic CSR, investing in people’s empowerment, can also lead to better business outcomes for the corporations that sponsor the interventions. It may seem counterintuitive to cheer this outcome, since the original impetus for the intervention in the first place is the social and economic inequality that these businesses are at least passively promoting. The hope is that the citizens will not become complacent in the face of minor improvements, and in the end will demand to be empowered more through, initially, CSR efforts, and in the end by the government and a more evolved social safety net.

Creating a Social Safety Net

Such a social safety net is slowly appearing in Kyrgyzstan. Though the government is currently loathe to outsource its services to NGOs, the practice is common across the US, Europe, and East Asia. These organizations have the experience of delivering key services in the most efficient way, and are the building blocks for what one day should be a stronger safety net. One such NGO is called Orphans Protection and Support, which was opened one year ago by a young man, Isken Baibosunov. Its mission is to finance and help orphanages in the Kyrgyz Republic. Isken works by himself, and he is not yet supported by any grants or government funding.

“I applied for a grant only once, but failed. I am not going to wait for the government though, I will do everything by myself,” Isken said.

Orphans Protection and Supportgets help from ordinary citizens, who donate clothes and money for food, and from Isken’s friends, who help him.

“Most of the time I spend money from my own pocket in order to help children in orphanages. I also get help from my old friends and ex-colleagues abroad. It is hard for local people to understand and supportmy efforts, and the government does not care most of the time. It is not only their fault. Our people are used to waiting for “magic,” thinking that someone will give them a grant, or will support them financially. That is why most of the orphanages are in such terrible condition. Our people need to understand that if they want something, they need to achieve it by themselves, they must not wait,” Isken said.

Orphans Protection and Support is also starting to concentrate on children empowerment. This special program is called “Intellectual Development.” The center works with local psychologists to council the orphans and helps them to make better decisions. Several articles that have come out in psychological journals have tried to make the case that people are not poor because they make bad decisions, but rather that they make bad decisions because they are poor. This type of intervention is not going to make the children materially better off, but it can give them some of the tools they need to make a judgment between a good decision and a bad decision. Eventually, NGOs like Orphans Protection and Support might be able to provide the material and economic security necessary for the students to sincerely thrive.

“What we provide gives a child an intellectual, cultural, and moral education. The kids listen to our guests very carefully and see them as role models, so they want to be able to help in the future,” Isken said.

Isken Baibosunov decided to share a memorable story that has stuck with him over this past year. “We visited one of the orphanages and brought food for the children, played with them, talked to them, and just gave them the feeling that they are needed and loved. At the end of our visit, I was ready to sit in the car and drive home, when a little boy ran to me, he could hardly speak, because he was too small, and he looked at me and said, “Thank you so much!” and ran away. I still remember this touching moment and his eyes. I work for these moments. I want all children be happy, because they are our next generation. They are the country’s future.”

This story is heartwarming, and also reminds us that helping others is not just a moral act, but also that it is a distinctly human act. After relating this story to Jenny Jie, she said, “Everyone of us is presented a unique talent and strength in this life. It doesn’t matter how successful we are. What matters is how meaningful we live in our personal life and in our common society,”.

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