Connectivity Providers Database

From: Norma Polanco <norma@silk.glas.apc.org> To: sghuter@psg.com Date: Mon, 5 Jun 1995 15:12:16 +0500 (GMT+0500) Dear Mr. Huter: Thank you for your interest in our little corner of the world. We would be happy to send you information about the status of our network. I'm including the most recent copy of our program update. This includes information on not only electronic mail, but our other projects as well. If you have any further questions please feel free to contact me. Here's the information you requested: Organization: Project for Economic Reform and Development in Central Asia (PERDCA) Address: 1 Furkhat St., Room 522, Tashkent 700027 Country: Uzbekistan Code: (3712) Contact Person: Rex McDonald or Norma Polanco Fax: (3712) 45-54-97 E-mail: Perdca@silk.glas.apc.org Host/Node name: Silknet %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% % Norma Polanco % Uzbekistan, Tashkent 700027 % % Special Assistant to the Director % Furkhat 1, #522 % % PROJECT FOR ECONOMIC REFORM AND % Phone/Fax: (3712) 45-54-97 % % DEVELOPMENT IN CENTRAL ASIA % E-mail: Norma@silk.glas.apc.org % %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% PERDCA PROGRAM UPDATE PROJECT FOR ECONOMIC REFORM & DEVELOPMENT IN CENTRAL ASIA May, 1995 The Project for Economic Reform and Development in Central Asia (PERDCA) serves as a liaison between the international technical assistance (TA) community and indigenous institutions, organizations and individuals of Central Asia. PERDCA is currently active with resident Western representation in Uzbekistan in the following areas: NGO Support Telecommunications Educational Reform NGO SUPPORT While increased links between indigenous NGOs and the international TA community are vital to the success of this sector, improved regional linkages are also necessary to support local sustainability. PERDCA helps NGOs develop regional contacts, as well as participating in the Central Asian Sustainable Development Information Network (CASDIN), a loose network of NGO activists from all over Central Asia. This organization serves as a resource for information and resource sharing based on local needs and input. Support for indigenous non-governmental organizations by international NGOs and governmental institutions can be a powerful influence stimulating and sustaining growth of newly democratic institutions. Since PERDCA's foundation, we have worked to establish relationships based on mutual trust with a number of indigenous NGOs in Uzbekistan. These relationships have resulted in a number of positive results including successful grant applications, improved communication and assistance in project development, strategic planning and other organizational skills. PERDCA/ICC Seminars This project was for all of Uzbekistan, open to all groups who wished to attend. The project included seminars and consultations in eight widely dispersed sites throughout the country, including the Fergana Valley, Central Uzbekistan and Karakalpakistan. This assisted in the development of regional contacts. This project held training in proposal writing with an emphasis on the materials and structures deemed appropriate and necessary by many Western granting organizations. PERDCA/ICC provided information as to the kinds of assistance that are available with a strong emphasis on creating self-sustainable organizations.. The seminars were one day workshops focusing on the major components of grant writing, the organization and financial reporting and responsibilities, as well as the organizations who might be able to assist these groups by financing their projects. There were individualized consultations at the end of the seminars to assist in understanding how such structures can play a role in their organizations overall mission statement. Approximately three weeks later, follow up consultations were held to assist those groups who had formulated grant proposals of their own. These consultations were conducted one-on-one where recommendations were made in response to specific problems. This was intended to help focus the groups proposal to be more acceptable to the general granting community. Both PERDCA and ICC saw a strong need for these seminars throughout the regions. Almost on a daily basis, representatives of organizations, as well as individuals, visit our respective organizations requesting assistance in writing proposals to some Western organization. We assist as part of our general mandate, but these seminars allowed us to extend this service throughout Uzbekistan and offer a much larger pool of trained individuals to continue the cycle of education in a much wider geographical region. PERDCA produced a training manual based on the sessions that include information covered at the seminars. The manual contains grant-writing advice with the main points of what a grant proposal should include outlined. The manual also includes the governmental procedure to register NGOs, a list of grantors and organization and financial reporting responsibilities. This manual will be published in both Russian and English and will be used for future training and seminars. It will also be available upon request to any NGO via InterNet and through hand-outs. This will be an active document, constantly updated to provide the most up-to-date information. Publications PERDCA has sponsored, or otherwise contributed to, several publications both in the print and electronic media. To assist in disseminating information germane to indigenous NGOs, PERDCA is assisting the Information Consulting Center of Samarkand in producing a grassroots newspaper. The information and results obtained from their monthly meeting, which we sponsor and host at our office, is published in this journal. These meetings are open to all NGOs, indigenous and foreign, though mainly targeting local NGOs in the hopes of assisting these organizations. With these intentions PERDCA paid for the transportation of representatives from several cities throughout Uzbekistan to attend these meeting so that issues that are important to people throughout Central Asia can be voiced. E-Mail Address Lists PERDCA has created a list-server of NGOs to provide anyone with e-mail a list of NGOs by country, activity and affiliation. During a conference hosted by CounterPart Consortium in Bishkek, Kyrgistan, PERDCA made the commitment to coordinate and disseminate information regarding any and all NGOs the represented groups had data on. This information includes contact personnel, activities and general facts about each NGO. The list can be added to and modified, and should serve as a valuable data base for those wishing to learn more about NGOs in Central Asia. This will also be very beneficial to incipient NGOs and their potential projects as they will have a data bank of grantors. Banking Reform PERDCA and Mercy Corps International have been at the forefront of an attempt to have special consideration given to NGOs concerning banking laws. It is presently impossible to have a bank account that can use both local and foreign currencies. This is a severe handicap. It is also extremely difficult for registered NGOs to open an account at any bank, and is impossible if the arduous registration process has not been completed. PERDCA, Mercy Corps International and the United Nations have been working with the World Monetary Fund, The Central Bank of Uzbekistan and the Ministry of Finances to guide the policy for charitable or non-profit organizations in a positive direction. Since PERDCA has received a grant from MCI, we are serving as the test case for this new policy. Friends of Uzbekistan Friends of Uzbekistan is a gathering point, in Tashkent, at which the technical assistance community gathers to share information and explore collaborative opportunities. The mission of the association is to improve the quality, increase the amount, broaden the extent and enhance the effectiveness of technical assistance to Uzbekistan. In order to be sustainable, any organization must have the active support of its constituency. In line with this component for success, a consortium of eight international organizations coordinates monthly meetings on a rotational basis. PERDCA participates in this rotation and is responsible for presenting each organization with a packet of information about the prior arrangements and tips for continuing successful Friends of Uzbekistan meetings. In addition to formalizing the international communities' commitment to Friends of Uzbekistan, this structure ensures that meetings continue to address a broad spectrum of issues and programs and includes the perspective of a variety of organizations and individuals. Monthly meetings facilitate coordination and cooperation between groups through the dissemination of useful information, the discussion of important TA experiences and the formulation of organizational positions on specific important issues. Friends of Uzbekistan activities have involved representatives from most of the major TA groups in Uzbekistan: the American Council for Collaboration in Education and Language Studies, the Central Asian Free Exchange, The Eurasia Foundation, the European Community, United States Agency for International Development, the United States Embassy, the United States Peace Corps, the World Bank, and several other embassies, international NGOs, private volunteer organizations (PVOs) and government delegations. ELECTRONIC MAIL PERDCAs creation of the Silknet network two years ago to establish electronic mail has expanded dramatically. We now provide electronic mail to not only Uzbekistan, but to many of the neighboring republics, such as Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgistan. PERDCA is constantly improving Silknet services to expand the telecommunications capabilities in Central Asia. We are seeking to access international networks and information resources directly from the West to strengthen and encourage the growth of local telecommunications infrastructure and capacity. This assists in stimulating development of local NGOs by providing a forum through which the TA and NGO communities can share information of value and general interest to all. PERDCA, in cooperation with the technical assistance communities in Central Asia, has expanded these services. With expansion grants from The Eurasia Foundation and the Soros Foundation, PERDCA will continue working to install subnodes throughout Central Asia. Subnodes will enable users in cities outside of Tashkent to connect by a local call, rather than a long distance call, to Tashkent and will provide open access hours so that people without computers can also take advantage of electronic communications. As part of that continuous improvement of the Silknet network we have produced into the system (utilizing a UUCP protocol that allows nodes that are unable to reach Tashkent) a bypass to access the Moscow node directly. This helps to assure that if political or technical problems close down the main server in Tashkent the other nodes will be able to receive their mail. PERDCA received assistance from both the United States Information Service and the Ministry of Higher Education of Uzbekistan to open a second public access site in Tashkent at Independence Square. It has full dial access to the Silknet system and is staffed with permanent PERDCA employees to facilitate usage of the system. The terminals provide a public access site for government and business people in the central region of Tashkent. This site has doubled the number of telephone numbers one can use to access our system. Because of the poor telephone system in Central Asia, it is important to have as much redundancy to insure reliable access to the system. This office will solve much of the problems we have been experiencing in making our system available throughout Tashkent. It has also served as an archetype in experiencing remote site set-up and maintenance. The electronic networking program is designed as such that technical expertise will expand parallel wise with system demands. As a result of this, and electronic mail expansions, we have discovered that the level of expertise necessary to maintain a connection is hard to find in the current climate within the Central Asian Republics. To address this problem, PERDCA held a training workshop for the System Operators of the Bishkek, Dushanbe, Samarkand, Bukhara and Independence Square systems in May. The number of people currently using our system has grown dramatically. Already there are more than 1400 subscribers on SilkNet. For this reason we are currently in the process of establishing Phase Two, Unix full dial in access nodes in several sites. We are also expanding the capability of the node in Samarkand, at the ICC, due to the enormous daily traffic through that system. We have remodeled our Furkhat, Tashkent office to provide a room that is completely a public access site, and employed an operator who assists users in uploading and downloading mail. EDUCATIONAL REFORM The mission of PERDCA has grown to include, under our mandate of economic reform and development, educational assistance in the form of the distribution of printed materials throughout Uzbekistan, as well as equipment or technical donations. Book Donations While some of these books are to governmental institutions, many are to NGOs and other non-profit organizations which falls directly under our mandate. PERDCA works with organizations such as The Eurasia Foundation, Mercy Corps International, Sabre Foundation, Seattle Sister City Committee, , the United States Information Service and the Uzbekistan Ministry of Higher Education to bring a large quantity of text and literature books to Central Asia in the hopes of spreading knowledge and ideas not previously encouraged in the Soviet Union. These books are distributed to educational institutions, non-governmental organizations and selected Western organizations, for the purpose of increasing the data base necessary for sustainable economic and political reform in the region. It is the view of PERDCA that the dissemination of information is fundamental to this reform. PERDCA assisted several organizations in the acquisition, shipment and distribution of thousands of English language books from the United States to Uzbekistan. These books were donated by the Sabre Foundation and the Seattle Sister City Committee. The books were shipped to Tashkent for distribution throughout the country. The shipping for the Seattle Sister City books was provided by Mercy Corps International, and the funding for the Sabre Foundation books was provided by The Eurasia Foundation. In coordination with these organizations, as well as the Ministry of Higher Education and the United States Information Service, PERDCA coordinated the distribution of over 21,000 books. We also obtained assistance from Mercy Corps International in the sorting, cataloging, distributing and tracking of these books throughout the Uzbek Republic. We are also in the process of requesting an additional grant to have Russian language Western economics and business books brought from Moscow for Uzbekistan distribution. These texts will help us establish the protocols and procedures that will help us with a fair and democratic distribution of the books on hand and will be used in the future for other such shipments. PERDCA is also in the process of working with USIS, Mercy Corps International and the International Book Project to have 65,000 medical, dental and legal books and journals brought into Uzbekistan. The equipment and supplies we are requesting would be used in that project also. It is PERDCA's goal to have over 360,000 books acquired, shipped and distributed throughout the Republic of Uzbekistan in the next two and one half years. We had, and will, distribute information about the location of these materials both by electronic mail and by copied material so a wider audience will have access to the books. The US Embassy and The Ministry of Higher Education planned large press releases, both in the television and print media, about the disbursement. We also placed flyers in the academic and commercial centers in the region to inform people of the availability of the materials. The information about these books, both an inventory of each lot place with each recipient and information as to how to gain access to these materials, was assembled by the PERDCA staff, reproduced in large quantities, and distributed along with the books themselves. It is part of the recipients agreement with PERDCA that they place these notifications in strategic places throughout the community. Thus these projects have taken on a level of major interest to PERDCA. We will be involved in such projects for a minimum of the next two years. We are in the process of creating a long-term information exchange center, and these book projects are a key portion of this effort. EQUIPMENT DONATIONS We have worked very closely with the Ulugbek Fund over the past few years and has proved to be an invaluable ally in the distribution of equipment. We have donated 19 computer servers, and thousands of books, to the Ulugbek Fund to support talented youth and the development of their intellectual potential. The Ulugbek Fund is over 500 years old with a rich tradition of support and development of intellectually gifted youths. The President of the Fund, is also the Minister of Higher Education, and as such appreciates the value of knowledge and education and has provided us with countless logistical support, not only in distribution throughout Uzbekistan, but by providing statistical data on their use so that we can more closely develop future donation projects. American Council for Collaboration in Education and Language Studies (ACCELS) PERDCA, in collaboration with ACCELS, requested and received a grant from the US Embassy in Tashkent for the purpose of providing electronic mail service to the families of those students who were awarded scholarships through the program ACCELS. PERDCA presently provides electronic mail service on request for any person in Uzbekistan who desires it. It was our hope to expand our service to include the parents of those students currently studying in the United States through the ACCELS program. This has provided a stable, reliable and rapid form of communication between the students and their parents and will provide a basis for understanding of electronic mail to an ever wider circle of Uzbek nationals. PERDCA is committed to continued NGO development, improving communications and broadened educational reform. These projects are a part of PERDCAs overall mission to serve the people of Uzbekistan and Central Asia. Norma Polanco Special Assistant to the Director PROJECT FOR ECONOMIC REFORM AND DEVELOPMENT IN CENTRAL ASIA May, 1995 KEY PERSONNEL Rex McDonald Director McDonald@silk.glas.apc.org Shukhrat Arifdjanov Administrative Director Shukhrat@silk.glas.apc.org Khakim Sultanov Director of Electronic Mail Services Hakim@silk.glas.apc.org Aziz Sabirov Director of Computer Services Azeez@silk.glas.apc.org Irina Nazarova Director of NGO Development Irina@silk.glas.apc.org Nella Mustafina Office Manager Nella@silk.glas.apc.org Hamed Mohammed Director of Educational and Logistical Services Mohammed@silk.glas.apc.org Norma Polanco Special Assistant to the Director/Public Relations Norma@silk.glas.apc.org For further information, please contact PERDCA's Tashkent office: Furkhat St. 1, Room #522 Tashkent-27, Uzbekistan Tel/Fax: (3712) 45-54-97 E-mail: perdca@silk.glas.apc.org