Otuz-Adyr expands access to youth recreation opportunities

The only girl attending freestyle wrestling club in Kysh-Abad village, Otuz-Adyr municipality – Asema Kalykova.

Key results:

• New sports and recreation service organized with financially sustainable fee
• Over 30 children enrolled in the municipality supported sports club   
• Showcasing local participatory governance in practice  

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Following recent successes of Kyrgyz women wrestling champions at the Olympic and global championships, many girls in Kyrgyzstan are eager to follow in their steps. 13-year-old Asema Kalykova who lives in the Otuz Adyr rural municipality near Osh is also inspired. Her father Talant Sadanov is a wrestling coach, and she is the only girl training in freestyle wrestling in Kysh-Abad, a village of 2,500 residents.

“I would like to repeat the achievements of the medalists from Kyrgyzstan and become a World Champion” – says Asema.

Despite starting training just half a year ago, she already won third place in a major tournament in Osh and is planning to attend a wrestling school for girls in the capital city Bishkek.

Asema is lucky to have started her training in a newly completed sports center in her village. Until recently, says her father Talant, local wrestlers had to train in an old tobacco drying barn, using improvised mats stuffed with grass. Now the local youth and children train in a new facility with all the needed equipment.

The sports center was funded jointly by village residents working abroad as labor migrants with contributions from the Otuz Adyr municipality and organized as a sustainable service with help of the USAID’s Successful Aimak 2 Project (USAID SA2).

Through focus group sessions and surveys, USAID SA2 helped the municipality staff and residents identify priority services, including - as flagged by most parents - having a sports service for kids. As a result, residents decided to arrange for access to a sports center and training as a sustainable, fee-supported service provided by local entrepreneur and sports trainer Talant Sadanov.

“It makes me happy when children make healthy choices and spend their time wrestling in my gym. I am going to be even happier when some of them will win medals choosing an athlete’s path” – says Talant.

Some of his youngest trainees are already showing promise. 9- and 10-year-old friends Almanbet and Bekzat, whose parents are working as migrants in Russia, already have won medals in local and regional tournaments.

USAID SA2 helped the municipality with training on service organization, estimating fees, holding public hearings, conducting procurement to awarding a service to a local entrepreneur and monitoring the quality of service. Importantly, when deciding to work with Talant Sadanov as the service provider, the municipality determined service fees jointly with the residents. The goal was to balance affordability and sustainability, ensuring it covers utilities, trainer’s fees and maintenance.

“The Project helped prepare contracts with the private entrepreneur and the municipality and parents, and even advised on creation of separate bank accounts so that everything complies with the legal regulations. There were so many nuances that we would not be able to organize and foresee all of them. We definitely needed this guidance and all the new skills that we received from the Project” – notes Nursultan Kalmatov, head of the Otuz-Adyr municipality.

The municipality, which joined the USAID SA2 target municipalities in January 2022, plans to apply this experience in setting up other similar sports clubs (wrestling, football, volleyball) at six other villages of Otuz Adyr, with over 19,500 residents in 3,100 households.

Besides the sports workshop, as part of the USAID SA2 Project the Otuz-Adyr municipality is also working on improving its water supply and solid waste removal services.

The USAID’s Successful Aimak 2 Project is a four-year program implemented by the Development Policy Institute across Osh, Jalal-Abad, Issyk-Kul and Naryn oblasts aimed at improving the well-being of citizens in 50 municipalities by improving the quality of public services provided by local governments. Learn more at www.fb.com/SA2Project.

Photo credit: Gulzhan Turdubaeva