Social Technologies Agency
Public Association Social Technologies Agency (STA), Kyrgyzstan
Non-governmental organization established with the goal to promote development of civil society in Kyrgyzstan through civic education, community development and public initiatives.
Background
In 1995 STA was founded as informal initiative group consisting of interactive training experts with different backgrounds – sociologists, philosophers, ecologists, historians. Throughout the years the trainer’s group has implemented a number of democratization projects including women’s rights and gender equality, capacity building of young leaders, environmental issues, elections, national minorities, community development and civic education. The programs have been implemented in collaboration with several international organizations and agencies.
During this long-term work, using experiences and lessons learned from the projects implemented by STA, proper planning mechanisms, assessment measures, program development strategies and team building mechanisms have been developed by STA. All this has allowed strengthening the team of STA trainers, establishing appropriate technological basis for the project implementation and capacity building.
Thus, in practice the team has experienced the importance, need and requirement to work with development of civil society, and after critical assessment of its own capacity as team, decision was made to officially register as public association. In spring 2001, the Social Technologies Agency was registered in the Ministry of Justice of the Kyrgyz Republic as Non-governmental Organization.
Activity strategy of the STA
All programs and activities carried out by STA are focused and developed for concrete target groups (for example: women, ethnic minority) in order to be able to build capacity and provide civic education to the diverse group of society.
Currently the priority target group for STA are women, who can become social leaders, and the main focus is on promoting a gender equality policy through interaction with state bodies at the national and local levels.
Brief description of the STA’s activities and achievements:
The Social Technologies Agency Public Association is one of the leading women non-government organizations, actively and effectively working for promotion of the gender equality policy and strengthening of women movement. That were the experts of the Social Technologies Agency who since 2001 have been initiators to create the first national network “Women can do it!” in Kyrgyzstan, from among women-leaders from all regions of the country and provided the methodological, expert, information and organizational support in foundation and development of this network, under the multi-year OSCE ODIHR (2001-2006) program. Today, this network continues to operate and is one of the key STA partners in the regions.
STA was the driving force and think tank of the lobbying campaign for gender quotas in the election legislation, to keep the principles of a secular state as vested in the Constitution, keeping the criminal punishment for polygamy, improving the gender legislation and establishing a separate authorized unit on gender policy in the government.
Gender expert examination of laws and government programs is one of the tools used in the STA activity. For the years of existence the STA has been promoting and achieved significant success in reinforcement of the gender expertise and application of gender analysis in process of development of the laws and public policy. Thus, as a result of multi-year lobbying, the requirement on gender expert examination of laws was included in the Law on Normative Legal Acts, and in the Law on the Regulation of the Parliament.
At the end of 2007, after first women were elected for the Parliament due to the implemented gender quotas, the Social Technologies Agency proposed to unify women MPs, women-leaders of the ministries and agencies into the Women’s Legislative Initiatives Alliance, together with leaders of women NGOs to promote the gender equality issues in the legislative authority of the country. Today, the Alliance includes more than 150 members, including 71 NGOs, 85 individuals, including 24 women – members of Parliament of the KR of the IV and V convocation. Today, the Alliance holds the gender expert examination of the legislation and draft laws, lobbies the gender issues at the level of the government and parliament.
STA continues to provide assistance to the Alliance of Women’s Legislative Initiatives in coordination of the activity and acts as the Alliance’s Secretary.
Since 2008, the Social Technologies Agency is consistently working on promotion of changes in practice of budgeting and planning, methodology of the gender budgeting, gender analysis of the effectiveness of foreign assistance and directly participated in facilitation of discussion and development by the Kyrgyzstani women organizations of the Appeals to the (High-Level Donor Coordination Forum) in Akkra in 2008 and Busan in 2011 with urgent call to focus on the critical and pressing gender issues and make gender-oriented decisions and recommendations aimed at facilitating the equity policy in implementation of the development programs, including the post conflict strategic development plans of Kyrgyzstan, safe development and strengthening of peace.
The STA projects aimed at gender mainstreaming in budget initiatives, included both the national, and local budgets. Therefore, the gender analysis of budgets was implemented in cities of Bishkek, Kant, Moscovskii district and budget of the local community in Chui oblast and as a result, public hearings or other forms of public discussions were organized. For the first time, the gender analysis was made on the draft Mid-term forecast of the budget for 2010–2012.
During 2010-2011, the Social Technologies Agency under the UNIFEM project “Strengthening of the economic safety of women” provided expert support to the Ministry of Labor, Employment and as the authorized state body in charge of gender policy, including on issues of gender lobbying in the draft Mid-term country development strategy, Mid-term budget forecast for 2011-2013 to 2011 and in the sector strategies of the pilot ministries and agencies: Ministry of Social Security, Ministry of Labor, Employment and Migration, State Registration Service.
Long STA’s cooperation with the authorized body in charge of gender policy (today, it is the Ministry of Youth, Labor and Employment) facilitated approval by the Ministry of the Manual for implementation of the comprehensive gender approach in the sector policy, and development and adoption by the government of the ever first long term strategic paper on the gender policy – The National Gender Equality Strategy to 2020 and The National Gender Equality Strategy to 2030, as well as National Action Plans for Achieving Gender Equality, which are adopted on the basis of the National Strategy every 3 years.
Since 2014, the Agency of Social Technologies has been carrying out Gender monitoring of electoral processes and the results of monitoring are widely covered in the media. As part of the monitoring, an analysis is being carried out to what extent state guarantees were observed during the 2020 parliamentary elections. In particular, during the monitoring of the last elections, the following were analyzed: the process of nomination and registration of political parties, the gender composition of candidate lists, election programs of parties, campaign materials distributed through mass media (mass media, including social networks) for the presence of gender-sensitive provisions in them.
Forms and methods of work
In its activity, STA aims at building the constructive cooperation with the state bodies, civil society organizations and facilitation to coordination between the groups and organizations interested in promotion of the equity policy.
STA’s cooperation experience:
STA has long experience of cooperation with state authorities.
| Name of the organization | Subject of cooperation |
| Jogoku Kenesh (Parliament) | Gender expert examination of laws, organization of the parliamentary hearings and meetings of the profile committees of the Parliament on issues of observance of human rights, gender equality |
| Ministry of Labor and Social Development (authorized body in charge of the state gender policy)
|
– Development, implementation and evaluation of the national state programs to achieve gender quality;
– Development and promotion of legislation to protect against gender and family violence; – Development and lobbying recommendation to incorporate gender aspects into sectoral activities of the ministries and agencies; – Including the gender measurement into activity of the ministry, as well as the Social Development Strategy and other documents in the area of social protection – Coordination of interaction with civil society organization, gender experts. |
| Ministry of Finance | – Testing the methodology of gender analysis of the staffing policy on the example of the Ministry of Finance (now the methodology is used by the State Personnel Service);
– Development and implementation of the tools for gender analysis of the budgets |
| Ministry of Economics | – Inclusion of gender aspects to the medium-term development strategies of the country and medium-term budget forecasts;
– Development and implementation of the methodology for strategic planning of sustainable development, considering gender aspects; – Development and implementation of the inventory methodology of state strategic programs for sustainable development, considering gender aspects; – Development of training modules and conducting training for civil servants on strategic planning with the gender perspective. |
| National Statistics Committee | – Improvement of the gender statistics;
– Development and promotion of gender indicators in the process of nationalization and adaptation of the Sustainable Development Goals for Kyrgyzstan. |
| State Registration Service | Inclusion of a gender dimension in the agency’s activity. |
| Ministry of Education and Science | – Gender analysis of the legislation on education and strategic documents of the ministry;
– Analytical review and recommendations for integrating a gender dimension in the education sector; – Development and testing of a methodology for anti-discrimination and gender examination of teaching aids. |
| Ministry of Justice | Gender expert examination of the legislation and implementation of the methodology for expert examination of by laws |
The following international organizations provided support to STA:
