The World Bank announced at the beginning of February, that they would support the building of civil society in Uzbekistan. This is the good news. The more tricky one is that the implementing partner is NANAOUZ. Going through teh website of NANAOUZ one can read all the phrases that are common to many international NGOs that work in the area of civil society. The chairman of NANAOUZ said: ‘the collaboration with the World Bank shows the development of dialogue and collaboration between the international community with Uzbekistan”. Now, that all is very positive one might think.

But there is more to it
If you go back to the post about NANAOUZ from summer 2006, things start to look slightly worrying. NANOUZ is an umbrella organisation which was created to bring Uzbek NGOs closer together. They became quite strong in 2006, while NGOs continued to be forced to leave the country. Right now NANAOUZ has a grant scheme for organisations that are respecting their values.

The interesting thing is, as seen with the law on NGOs and the law on mass media, that the language used seems to be very much like of other real NGOs. One reason for this might be that employees of NANAOUZ used to work for US and other INGOs. But the underlying content and intention are to stabilize the situation in Uzbekistan.