For more than 15 years, Ulugbek Nurumbetov has worked for peace in Kyrgyzstan, his home country, as close as possible to local communities. In 2019, he founded the Institute for Peace and Development (IPD), which he has led ever since, and developed its network of Peace Clubs, now one of the country’s largest community-based peacebuilding networks. A portrait of a Missions Publiques Fellow.
Before founding the IPD, Ulugbek spent more than 10 yearsworking for international organisations active in Central Asia. After an internship at a German organisation partnering with ifa (the German Institute for International Cultural and Educational Relations), he worked for five years on several projects in Kyrgyzstan: peace dialogues, a training programme for peace and conflict consultants, and a project to prevent religious radicalisation among young people.
Looking back, Ulugbek also remembers this period as a time when distrust of NGOs was steadily taking hold in Kyrgyzstan. A bill “foreign agents” legislation had by then been debated in the Kyrgyz Parliament for several years. “That process showed just how weak NGOs’ credibility was,” he explains. “People simply don’t understand what they do; they associate them with foreign interests rather than local needs.”
This experience, combined with his work on the ground, pushed him to change his approach. At the time, he took part in coordination meetings for around a dozen international and local NGO consortiums, funded by the donors such as the European Union, USAID. There, he observed something all these organisations had in common: concentrated in the capital and provincial centres, they kept reaching the same participants, never a wider population. It was this realisation that drove him to want to do things differently, this time by building organisations rooted directly at the community level. That is how, in 2019, the Institute for Peace and Development (IPD) came into being.
“The IPD’s mission is to promote peace and social cohesion by supporting peace initiatives, providing civic education and fostering the development of community organisations,” Ulugbek explains. Of all the institute’s projects, the Peace Club network is the one he is proudest of.
The first clubs were set up in late 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. In his previous projects, Ulugbek had noticed that once they ended, participants rarely kept up their involvement on their own. He therefore decided to invest in collective structures rather than individuals, with clubs of at least 20 members each, so that they never depend on just one or two people.
A Peace Club brings together mainly young people, but also teachers and community leaders, around a shared committee. Free and open to all, the clubs are based in schools. This choice reflects a local reality: in rural Kyrgyzstan, Ulugbek explains, the school is often, along with the mosque, the only real community space in the village. There is usually no theatre, library or cinema. So it is at the school that events, celebrations, elections and even concerts take place.
The clubs rely on toolkits and training modules designed by the IPD, passed on from one generation of students to the next so that the work can continue over time. The network tackles very real social issues, starting with human trafficking. With more than half of the working-age population having emigrated, mainly to Russia and Kazakhstan, the country is among the world’s main sources of trafficking. The network also works to counter religious radicalisation and, more recently, gender-based violence.
The network grew quickly: 10 schools in the first year, more than 50 in the second, more than 80 in the third. It keeps growing every year, often without direct involvement from the IPD. In a remote district where the institute had never worked before, teachers set up 15 clubs on their own initiative. Today, more than 300 clubs are active across the country, bringing together several thousand young leaders and 600 teachers. According to Ulugbek, the director of a national civic education programme told him that the IPD’s network had the greatest civic reach in this field, more than all the United Nations agencies combined.
Building a movement from the ground upUlugbek has always favoured an approach built from the population. “We are building a genuine movement,” he explains. “The more ordinary citizens become part of it, the less they see us as an outside actor, and the more they see themselves as stakeholders.”
IPD chose this path from the outset. UN agencies are now supporting its work more actively: UNICEF is currently funding the creation of new clubs in new communities. Ulugbek’s goal is to eventually cover at least half of the country’s schools.
Ulugbek Nurumbetov is a Missions Publiques Fellow: https://missionspubliques.org/the-global-fellows-program/
