Kyrgyz Youth Parliament Prepares Future Politicians

For the last five months, young people from all over Kyrgyzstan have gathered for a Youth Parliament, to teach them the basics of political activity and encourage them to think about real issues in a structured way.

The 58 “legislators” had a chance to meet serving parliamentarians and develop their own proposals to put forward for general debate.

The exercise was run by the Foundation for Democracy Support, with funding from the US embassy in Kyrgyzstan and the American aid agency USAID.

The speaker of the simulated parliament, Dastan Japarov, said the project also showed that young people were a distinct constituency that the authorities needed to take seriously.

If funding is found for a second round of the project, the youth parliament will elect a “government” whose members will have to design strategies for tackling the challenges currently facing their country.

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For the second report in this package, IWPR visited the mountain village of Oytau to meet Saghynay Muinykova, a mother struggling to maintain her eight children in difficult circumstances. Both she and her husband are unemployed, the child benefits they receive are tiny, so the only money coming into the household is the income from kumys, a popular Kyrgyz drink made of fermented mare’s milk.

The audio programme, in Russian and Kyrgyz, went out on national radio stations in Kyrgyzstan, as part of IWPR project work funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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