Some 65 percent of the Kyrgyz Republic’s population lives in rural areas, and the vast majority of them are poor. Following independence, the breakup of most state and collective enterprises and the drastic decline in public budgetary resources caused a sharp deterioration of most social and economic infrastructure facilities, particularly in the rural areas. A number of small initiatives had been launched by external donors and NGOs to maintain local infrastructure and strengthen community-level capacity. The Government also started to implement a policy of gradual administrative decentralization and looked to IDA for help in generating community-level capacity and commitment to resolve local problems.
The objective of the Village Investment Project is to help alleviate poverty, improve the quality of village life, and generate community-level capacity for tackling local development concerns. The project does this, at the grassroots level, by helping communities and local authorities work together and by supporting income- and employment-generating investments in village infrastructure and in group-managed small and medium enterprises. A second Village Investment Project was approved in August 2006 to enable expansion of the program to all 473 of the country’s local government administrations. The project design drew extensively on the experience of other community development and empowerment activities in Kyrgyzstan and elsewhere. The pilot phase was designed and implemented in close collaboration with local and international institutions and agencies operating in rural Kyrgyzstan.
Established well-functioning community organizations for over half of the country’s population, and provided access to essential social and economic infrastructure services such as safe drinking water, health facilities, schools, irrigation, and road transport to almost three quarters of all Kyrgyz villages.
Highlights:
- From 2004 to 2006, more than 3000 individual micro-projects were completed under the project. This includes 770 schools built or repaired, 203 primary health facilities, 374 information and resource centers, 112 bath houses, 200 drinking water supply systems, 126 bridges, 187 small irrigation schemes, 299 electricity supply schemes, 152 village roads, and over 300 group-managed income-generating projects.
- Over the period 2004-2006, a total of 571 income-generating micro-projects were implemented, which constitutes 17 percent of the total number of micro-projects completed over the period. The following types of income-generating micro-projects are the ones that were most supported by the communities: 132 sewing workshops, 49 small mills, 43 joiner’s shops and 29 oil press.
- 1328 of 1883 villages were actively participating in the project in 2006, covering 67.8 percent of the country’s rural population.
- Some 53,000 local leaders chosen by the communities received direct, intensive training in local development planning, basic budget management, procurement, and contracting.
- Over 500,000 children are attending schools with properly repaired roofs, windows, and heating systems.
- Over 400,000 villagers have access to a functioning primary health facility in their community.
- More than 300,000 villagers have access to safe drinking water and to a bath house with hot water within their village.
- The IDA contribution has been especially significant in bringing national and international NGOs and donors together to complement each others’ efforts in community development; providing an operational framework for collaboration and for scaling up and/or supplementing earlier small operations initiated by others; mobilizing communities, providing capacity building at the level of rural municipalities and individual villages; and inducing other donors to join (Germany and the United Kingdom).
- The total project cost of the first Village Investment Project was about US$29 million, of which IDA provided US$15 million, the Kyrgyz Government US$475,000, Kyrgyz communities US$1.83 million (in cash or in kind), a grant from Japan US$1.15 million, and Germany Euro 8 million. The total cost for the Second Village Investment Project is US$36.2 million, of which IDA will provide US$15 million, the UK (DfID) US$13.7 million, and the Kyrgyz communities will contribute about US$7.5 million.
The positive experience and impact of the project caused the government to request additional support for the project, and IDA recently approved a second grant of US$15 million to continue the project and expand it to the rest of the country.
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