Praxis Series Paper No.7. Promoting collaboration between NGOs and Trade Unions – Lessons from Kyrgyzstan

This learning paper by Charles Buxton is based on four years of exploratory work to bring together activists and experts from the NGO and trade union sectors in Kyrgyzstan around topics of mutual interest. It presents the key results from a three-year project (2015 and 2018) that promoted dialogue and joint activities between NGOs and trade unions around employment and labour rights in Kyrgyzstan.

The paper identifies ways in which NGOs and trade unions can search for common ground on key issues around employment and unemployment, outlines capacity building areas that were found to be relevant to joint work – via training and action research – and raises some big and small issues that remained at the end of the current phase of work. It offers valuable lessons that could be used in other contexts to encourage collaboration between civil society actors that rarely come together.