Back in 2020, Central Asia Solidarity Groups have launched “Strategic Resource Fund” to support civil society actors in Central Asia. It aims to provide resources for civil society actors for strategic interventions in their respective contexts. The fund primarily focuses on financial resources, but can also provide various forms of capacity building, international networks, and partnerships, long-term funding schemes, etc. Over the course of the past year, we have supported three projects in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. All three of our partners within this funding scheme are grassroots and are closely tied to local communities – something that CAG...
Women-led permaculture initiatives in semi-desert villages of Kyrgyzstan – part 2 (From seeds to harvest)
Since March 2021, CAG together with a local organization El-Too is implementing a project to introduce permaculture initiatives among 60 rural women of 5 villages in Kyrgyzstan. The goal of the project is promoting the womens’ role in land management, building sustainable livelihoods, facilitating gender equality and creating food sovereignty through permaculture kitchen gardens in semi-desert areas that suffer from land degradation. This is the second blog post about the project (you can find the first blog post here). Taking into account the level of knowledge of farmers and geographic conditions described by the lack of water and precipitation,...
Women-led permaculture initiatives in semi-desert villages of Kyrgyzstan – part 1
Since 2018, CAG has worked within the thematic areas of climate and environment in Central Asia. This year we are piloting permaculture initiatives among rural communities in Kyrgyzstan as an intervention to deal with the problems of food insecurity, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss as well as gender inequality and community health. The pilot project is being implemented with local partner El-Too and was launched in March. This is the first of a series of blog posts about this exciting and innovative project. The villages on the south-west of Issyk-Kul lake, Kyrgyzstan, that are located in semi-desert areas are...
Environment and Climate Activism Workshops with our partner organization in Kyrgyzstan
What is the climate crisis and what can we do about? These are questions we explored during a two-week climate residency in Osh, Kyrgyzstan with members and staff of youth organization Novi Ritm. It was a fun, challenging, learning-filled, and eye-opening! To answer these questions we dag more deeply into what global climate change is, how different ecosystems are being impacted and what the consequences of that are on individual, community, societal and global levels. In this we took on a climate justice perspective, examining global inequalities and why some communities are being impacted more drastically than others. As...