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Fighting against Discrimination of Women from Ethnic Minorities and Ensuring their Equal Access to Public Services

In Kyrgyzstan, the Foundation currently implements a project funded by the European Union “Fighting against discrimination of women from ethnic minorities and ensuring their equal access to public services”, which started in November 2019. The project duration is 24 months. The overall objective of the project is to overcome discrimination and marginalisation of ethnic minority women in order to ensure their equal entitlement to public services. It’s specific objective is to improve the legal framework for the provision of public services among ethnic minority women; to strengthen civil society engagement in monitoring of observance of human rights standards in receiving public services, providing free legal aid and reporting on discrimination cases as well as to raise awareness on equal entitlement to public services among the target groups and disseminate best practices.

Target groups and beneficiaries of the project include women from ethnic minorities, civil society organisations, government officials, journalists, professional associations and human rights organisations, central government bodies, public councils at target ministries and local authorities governing territories with a high density of ethnic minorities.

Project activities will be designed in line with the specific objectives of the project. At the first stage of the project implementation, a team of lawyers will analyse the regulatory framework for the provision of public services in education, health care, social protection, housing and elaborate recommendations for improvements of the existing legal framework. As a next step, the capacity of civil society organisations working with the ethnic minority women will be strengthened through training in order to better monitor, promote and protect the rights of the final beneficiaries. Assistance will be provided to civil society organisations to improve their capacities in providing free legal aid to ethnic minority women and reporting on discrimination cases. Moreover, it is planned to train journalists and to organise an information campaign to raise awareness on the equal entitlement of the beneficiaries to public services.