Importing Civil Society: Foreign Aid and the Women's Movement in Russia

Demokratizatsiya

Volumn 8, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 65-82

  Henderson, Sarah ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO   (United States)

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EID: 0011073172     PISSN: 10746846     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. For example, USAID funded activities focusing on civic initiatives and NGO sector support (from 1992-current) total over $92 million. Much of this money was then allocated to organizations such as IREX, World Learning, and Eurasia to administer specific programs, such as the Institutional Partnerships Program, Sustaining Partnerships into the Next Century, democracy development programs under the National Democracy Institute.
2. Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Robert D. Putnam, "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," Journal of Democracy (July 1995).
3. Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Robert D. Putnam, "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," Journal of Democracy (July 1995).
4. Overall, women as a group have been the primary losers from the transition. In the realm of economics, women make up a much higher (but decreasing) proportion of the unemployed. In 1992, 72 percent of the registered unemployed were women. This figure decreased to 60.3 percent in 1996 (ILO, Yearbook of Labor Statistics, 1996 and World Bank, Statistical Handbook, 1996). Women over the age of forty-five, women with small children, and women of childbearing age who do not have children are at greatest risk for unemployment. See Lyudmila Rzhanitsyna, "Women's Attitudes Toward Economic Reforms and the Market Economy" in Valentina Koval, ed., Women in Contemporary Russia (Providence, RI: Berghan Books, 1995), 35-36. There is also widespread anecdotal evidence of discrimination in the job market. In the political sphere, women's quotas in representative bodies were abolished, and women's representation subsequently plummeted in the following elections. Numerous women have formed NGOs to fight these losses in the economic and political spheres.
5. Overall, women as a group have been the primary losers from the transition. In the realm of economics, women make up a much higher (but decreasing) proportion of the unemployed. In 1992, 72 percent of the registered unemployed were women. This figure decreased to 60.3 percent in 1996 (ILO, Yearbook of Labor Statistics, 1996 and World Bank, Statistical Handbook, 1996). Women over the age of forty-five, women with small children, and women of childbearing age who do not have children are at greatest risk for unemployment. See Lyudmila Rzhanitsyna, "Women's Attitudes Toward Economic Reforms and the Market Economy" in Valentina Koval, ed., Women in Contemporary Russia (Providence, RI: Berghan Books, 1995), 35-36. There is also widespread anecdotal evidence of discrimination in the job market. In the political sphere, women's quotas in representative bodies were abolished, and women's representation subsequently plummeted in the following elections. Numerous women have formed NGOs to fight these losses in the economic and political spheres.
6. Of course, the list of foreign funders is much longer. MacArthur is very active, as are the Global Fund lor Women, League of Women Voters, FrauenAnstiftung, and the embassies of the Netherlands and Ireland.
7. Valerie Sperling. Organizing Women in Contemporary Russia: Engendering Transition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 248-92.
8. Sperling, "Foreign Funding of Social Movements in Russia," Policy Memo #26 (1998).
9. The concept of a civil society was not officially recognized until 1986, when the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Council of Ministries adopted a resolution to create the first charitable foundations since the revolution. These included, among others, the Soviet Children's Foundation, the Foundation of Culture, and the Soviet Foundation of Mercy and Health. This resolution legalized the idea of charity in the USSR and provided the first step toward the further development of public initiatives. In 1990, the law "On Public Associations" gave a legal basis to the creation and existence of independent public associations and charitable organizations, at which point the nonprofit sector began to multiply. The new organizations focused on areas that the centrally controlled party organizations never touched, such as social support for disabled people, lonely pensioners, the homeless, protection of the environment, and the women's movement. Paul LeGendre, The NonProfit Sector in Russia, CAF/Russia, 1997.
10. A recent Charities Aid Foundation/Russia study estimated a total of 160,000 organizations, although 100,000 of them are religious groups, political parties, consumer cooperatives, and professional unions that are regulated by separate legislation. The director of the Institute for the Problems of Civil Society, Maria Slobodskaia, offered her own estimate at 58,000, while the Yeltsin administration officials peg the number slightly higher at 70,000. Lisa Petter, "USAID/Russia NGO Sector Analysis," draft.
11. Although the word "advocacy" is not translatable into Russian, the term usually refers to organizations that are involved in the defense of human rights, lobbying, or the development of legislation.
12. LeGendre, The Non Profit Sector in Russia.
13. "Zhenskiye Organizatsii v Rossiye Sevodnya," in Spravochnik: Zhenskiye Nepravitelstvenniye organizatsii v Rossii i SNG.
14. Ibid.
15. The first wave of foundations tended to award small grants (less than $5,000); The main grant recipients were groups that focused on human rights, the environment, education, the women's movement, and legislative development.
16. The Civic Initiatives Program was implemented by a consortium of five U.S. NGOs: Educational Development Center, Counterpart Foundation, Johns Hopkins University/Institute for Policy Studies, Center for Democracy, and Save the Children. Each member of the consortium contributed specialized expertise to the program through training, workshops, consultations, and the development of resource materials and publications; overall program management and coordination was provided by Save the Children. Larry Dershem and Valeri Patsiorkorvski, "Needs and Capacity Assessment of the Third Sector in Central Russia: Kaluga, Yaroslavl', Smolensk, Tula, Tver', Vladimir, Ryazan', and Moscow Oblasts," 1997.
17. Grants vary from $40,000 to over $200,000 and Ford attempts to build long-term partnerships with Russian organizations and give grants to cover a number of years of operating costs.
18. The MacArthur Foundation actually discontinued their travel grants program in 1997 because of the overwhelming administrative paperwork involved in filing grant papers. Interview, 11 August 1998.
19. The exact number I calculated from looking through their 1997 archives was $462,479, distributed to eighteen separate projects.
20. Calculated from Ford's "Grants Related to Russia - FY1996/97."
21. NGOs as a whole are having difficulty learning how to "fundraise," a new term unfamiliar to many in Russian society. Government support is usually minimal because of the economic condition of Russia and many NGOs rely on foreign assistance to survive.
22. Of course, I am looking at these organizations after the fact; thus it is impossible to state definitively cause and effect. Naturally, there is a process of self-selection - groups that receive funding can already have an advantage over groups that have not received funding. The criteria for receiving funding are such that more organized groups receive funding over those that are more isolated and have less access to information regarding grants.
23. This did not prevent organizations from sending lengthy letters explaining their answers, or from sending me more detailed information about their organization, thus providing me with invaluable insight and detail to individual organizations and their attitudes.
24. I received 144 surveys after the first mailing; in addition, 16 surveys were returned to me marked "return to sender: address unknown." Nonrespondents were sent another survey; I received an additional 42 surveys, and 6 were returned to sender. Although I received a total of 184 surveys, 3 were duplicates, so my final count was 181.
25. This list of interviews does not include all the various informal conversations meetings, and seminars I have attended as well.
26. Volgograd Committee of Soldiers' Mothers, Survey 12.
27. Survey 27.
28. Survey 27.
29. Lyubava, Survey 24.
30. The authors of the Spravochnik quote an even higher number, reporting that 63 percent of groups received money from foreign foundations. Part of the discrepancy could be explained by the fact that even though we used the same data base, different groups answered our respective requests for information.
31. One confusing aspect of the data is that groups who answered yes to having an office were to skip to the next question, not needing to answer "If no, then where do you meet." Seventy-four groups did not have an office, yet ninety-three groups answered the "If no, then where do you meet" - an overlap of nineteen groups that supposedly had an office. This implies that some groups, even if they have an office, meet in other places, because many groups have different conceptions of what constitutes an "office." For some groups it is a desk in a room for a few hours a week. Other groups have space that they rent. Other group leaders may consider their office their apartment, which could explain some of the overlap.
32. As with the office dilemma, it was unclear how groups were interpreting "Does you organization have a computer, e-mail," etc. Again, groups scrawled in options in the margins, such as "at work," "through another organization," and so on.
33. Survey 20.
34. Given the aversion to politics, perhaps women activists feel much more comfortable developing personal relations with local level government. In addition, developing access is easier.
35. Liski Regional City Women's Council, Survey 21.
36. Women's Union of the Republic of Buryatia, Survey 20.
37. Survey 20.
38. TACIS, or Technical Assistance to the Commonwealth of Independent States, is the European Union's version of USAID (roughly).
39. Of course, this does not represent the total amount of grants given by the organizations. In interviews, many groups were very secretive about their sources of money, or coyly would avoid listing all of the sources of their funding. A more accurate idea of the sizes and number of grants given to women's groups can be found by poring through the records of annual reports and records for the past eight years for the major foundations (I did this for Eurasia in 1997 and Ford 1997). However, by asking the groups to list the organizations from which they had received funding, I was able to widen my knowledge of grant-making institutions that focus on women's projects.
40. The German Greens used to have a section - Frauenanstiftung - that gave money. However, that department has since been reorganized.
41. Unfortunately, the difference washes out if one conflates important and very important.
42. Unfunded groups were more likely to check off "often" (23 percent), while funded groups registered at only 16 percent.
43. Again, the difference washes out when "often" and "very often" categories are conflated.
44. Sperling, "Foreign Funding of Social Movements in Russia."
45. Sperling discusses a similar phenomena of fractionalization and centralization in Organizing Women in Contemporary Russia, 265-69.
46. See mission statements of the Ford, Eurasia, and MacArthur Foundations on their strategies with NGOs.
47. The emphasis on tangible "results" (thus the reign of the data base, the journal, the conference) also inadvertently creates projects that tended to affect a small amount of women and ensures that grants usually circulate within a small elite of women who know "how to write grants."
48. Interview, 11 August 1998.
49. Interview, 3 July 1998.
50. Interview, 3 July 1998.
51. Interview, 3 July 1998.
52. Personal correspondence, 28 July 1998.
53. E-mail correspondence, 1 September 1998.
54. Personal corespondence, 3 January 1999.
55. Sperling, Organizing Women in Contemporary Russia, 278-80.
56. Interview, 13 July 1998.
57. This is particularly true of organizations implementing USAID funded projects. Often, they feel that the Washington office is more considerate/engrossed with dealing with Congress than in understanding the current reality of NGO development in Russia. Thus, some funders are constrained in their ability to fund certain projects (for example, to explicitly gay or lesbian groups, or groups that want to work on a lobbying nature, because of the Washington USAID fears of congressional reaction.
58. To what degree are the problems reflected within the women's movement indicative of NGO development as a whole? To some extent, NGO development remains extremely uneven between sectors and across regions across Russia, and the same holds true for women's groups. Feminist oriented women's groups still predominate in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and central Russia represents the whole range of women's activism. In regions outside of central Russia, more traditional organizations (such as former Soviet Women's Committees, League of Women Invalids, and branches of the Movement of Russian Women) maintain their old networks while newer groups focused on a specific purpose (for example, Committee of Soldiers' Mothers) establish strong ties with the community. Women's activism varies from region to region and takes on different forms to meet the needs of the community and reflect the forms of funding received.
59. Interview, 3 July 1998.
60. Interview, 16 March 1998.
61. Interview, 11 August 1998.
62. Lena Kotchkina enforced this view when discussing the successes in obtaining grants of her own organization, Moscow Center for Gender Studies. She discussed the early projects as well as their ability to lay a track record, which ensured their ability to get even more grants through their connections. Interview, 25 July 1998.
63. However, there is self-selection at work here. Most traditional women's groups do not apply for foreign funding. However, mainstream charitable organizations complain that they are unable to get access to funds when other, feminist groups are able to get them.
64. This does not include one of the more recent developments in the women's movement in Russia, which is the crisis center movement, which has been getting increasing support among funders and is developing ties with the community. This is a submovement that is growing rapidly and is exhibiting tangible results.
65. Interview, 22 July 1998.
66. As quoted by Putnam in "Bowling Alone," 1.
67. Interview, 23 July 1998.