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New NGO umbrella organisation

Establishment of a new civil society group is under way in Kazakhstan with the aim of developing civic society and supporting the fledgling NGO sector in the country. "The purpose of establishing [the group] is to solve common problems that have accumulated in the third sector," Dametken Alenova, head of "Yedinstvo", told IRIN from the Kazakh commercial capital, Almaty, on Tuesday. A meeting of 170 civil society groups which was held earlier this month, decided to establish an NGO umbrella body in Kazakhstan. Alenova said that the new NGO organisation would be based on democratic principles with no leader and no grading of NGOs according to their experience, programmes or project portfolios. "NGOs dealing with people with disabilities are only focused on the disabled. But we have problems common to all NGOs, there is poor definition of NGO activities and the only thing that we get from the authorities is permission to register, that is all," Alenova said, decrying the lack of a regulatory framework and financial support for the sector in Kazakhstan. "NGOs mainly exist relying on grants from international donors and it is very bad because donor organisations are not quite aware of our problems and specific issues," she said. "We have a lot of our own problems, therefore we needed to consolidate and unite to resolve them," she added. According to Alenova, some 7,000 organisations have been registered in the country, of which 3,500-4,000 were genuine NGOs. After re-registration, up to 1,500 remained, of which between 300 and 400 were currently active. NGOs have played a major role in development in some Central Asian republics, like Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, in others like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, they are viewed with official suspicion and tightly controlled.

This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions

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