United Nations in the Kyrgyz Republic
We support the United Nations Country Team in Kyrgyzstan to strengthen their peacebuilding impact.
The Partner
The United Nations agencies in Kyrgyzstan, together with their national partners, implement programmes supported by the UN Peacebuilding Fund. These programmes seek to build social cohesion, increase the participation of young people and women in peacebuilding processes and address inter-ethnic tensions and radicalisation so as to prevent violent extremism.
Our Support
We have been supporting the UN Country Team in the Kyrgyz Republic since 2013, when they requested help with analysing and designing programmes to address the root causes of the 2010 inter-ethnic clashes in the Southern part of Kyrgyzstan. We supported the design of the first Peacebuilding Priority Plan and UN programmes to reduce inter-ethnic tensions.
The second Peacebuilding Priority Plan for Kyrgyzstan, agreed in 2017, has a specific focus on preventing violent extremism. We provided support to strengthen strategic planning, risk management and conflict sensitivity of these programmes. This also included a learning and adaptation strategy to ensure that they adapt in response to new evidence collected during implementation.
In 2018, the new UN Resident Coordinator, Ozonnia Ojielo, asked us to further support the UN Country Team on peacebuilding and conflict prevention in the country, through conducting a new conflict and peace analysis. This is intended to serve as the basis for a comprehensive approach to peacebuilding, with a strong alignment between the work of the UN and the government. The analysis is starting to be used as the basis for a dialogue between the UN and the government on joint prioritisation of peacebuilding needs in the country.
The Results
This partnership has already produced concrete results. For example, the number of cases of inter-ethnic clashes has dropped significantly from 51 cases in 2012 to 2 cases in 2018, according to the Ministry of InternaI Affairs and the State Agency on Local Self-Governance and Interethnic Relations data. UN programmes to support the capacity of local civil society and state agencies to identify and respond to early signs of tension are widely viewed as having contributed to this positive trend.
The learning and adaptation strategy on Preventing Violent Extremism prompted changes in how programmes are implemented. For example, they have adapted the language they use around religion, radicalisation and extremism to avoid stigmatizing certain groups, and they have reallocated resources between communities in response to findings about the relative severity of the risk of radicalisation.
Moreover, our partner the UN Peacebuilding Support Office, recognises the importance of integrating learning and adaptation, especially in innovative programming where the evidence around the challenge and potential solutions is weak. The Kyrgyzstan programme therefore also serves as an opportunity to field-test new approaches to strengthening learning and adaptation within UN programmes more broadly.
