Mongolia Updates

  Savings Groups Expanding

As of March 30, 2006 approximately, 30 saving groups with some 506 residents have been established in Arkhangai, Bayankhongor, Govi-Altai, Erdenet, Tuv, Dundgovi, Sukhbaatar, Darkhan and Dornogovi aimags.
Trainings were conducted among ger area residents of proposed urban centers of the project including Erdenet, Bayankhongor and Gobi-Altai and at request of governors and residents of ger areas established nearly 10 savings groups.
Total amount of savings is about MNT 1.8 million tugrug.

Last week we visited to Govi-Altai city, which is about 1000 kilometers from Ulaanbaatar city by car. This is one of the remote cities of Mongolia. Although, we successfully conducted the saving activity trainings among the residents with 9 saving sub groups consisted of 50 members. There are some experiences in establishment of savings groups mostly among workers of business entities and small companies.

This update from
Ts. Enkhbayar
UDRC,Mongolia

Erdenet is the second city of Mongolia and we conducted the training among resident about 14 saving sub groups of 6 groups consisted of 74 members on 5 March, 2006.  All groups were agreed to save MNT100 on daily basis and initial revolving fund of total groups was MNT 8800 and within one year they will be able to save MNT 3.2 million. It shows that community based saving activities will be the basic preparation of communities for development of proposed project. Also in Bayankhongor we established the saving groups with 8 sub groups of 4 groups among 144 residents. Total of MNT 98,400 tugrug were saved at first meeting.

Contact details
Ms. Enkhbayar Tsedendorj,
Urban Development Resource Center (NGO)
P.O. Box 686,
Ulaanbaatar 46,
MONGOLIA

Thai Exchange Visit to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Savings groups begin

The following are Somsook's notes on the visit

.  Who was on the Thai team?

Mongolia is a very interesting country, and the people I met who are working there are very enthusiastic, very ready to learn and listen – clearly wanting to do things.  They include some government officials working at the upper policy level (ministerial advisors from three ministries), several NGOs, and some professionals working under the ESCAP support program.  It was a very good trip, very fruitful.  We managed to have discussions with people from all the layers, from the Minister of Construction, to the NGOs and the local NGO coalition, and to the community people.

Meeting several professionals we'd met on an earlier exposure visit to Thailand

I had also been quite impressed with this same group of very active, enthusiastic officials, NGO workers and ESCAP support staff when several of them came to Bangkok recently on an exposure trip.  Three of the women who came told me that before that Thailand trip, they hadn't known each other that well, but that because of the trip, they has gotten to know each other and sort of clicked with each other – so now they were like friends from school days.  This is one of the benefits of exposure trips outside one's own country:  people who otherwise have no reason to interact are suddenly thrown closely together for a short, intense period of travel and learning.  And since that exposure visit, all these people from different sectors in Mongolia have been able to link their work together. 

We see many groups from many different countries coming to visit the work here in Thailand, but we don't often know what happens when these groups go back home.  So it's interesting for me to see the friendliness that has developed back in Mongolia between these people.  They were also telling us that by seeing the Thai process, they were able to think a lot and discuss among themselves about the big issues which occur back home.  In this way, the visit deepened their understanding and also deepened the relationship between them.  And I think they really meant it when they told me this – they weren't just saying the polite or the expected thing. 

The enthusiasm of Genghis Khan

These people's enthusiasm really impressed me – and it reminded me of their national hero, the 13th Century Mongolian emperor Genghis Khan.  This, after all, was a man who was able to conquer all the way across Asia to Europe!  If a place can produce such conquerors, and such enthusiastic development professionals, there must be something special about that place!

Mongolia is a vast country

three times the size of Thailand, but with only 2.5 million people in it.  Despite the enormous social and political upheavals of recent decades, most of the people there are still nomads, and it is their nomadic life herding cattle and living in ghers which still defines the general picture of Mongolia's civilization.  When we drove through the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, you can still see so many encampments of their round tent-houses (which they call gher), with their herds of horses, cows and camels. 

The gher house

One of the most fascinating things about these Mongolian nomadic people is the kind of house they construct.  The gher is like a tent, but round in shape, and insulated with mud and woolen-felt to keep out the fierce winds during the icy cold winters.  This house is really quite perfect for Mongolia.  This house can keep you warm even in the cold weather – the colder it gets, you just add insulation.  They told us it's possible to put up a gher in about an hour.

Nomadic people move four times a year

They also told us that these nomads have to move at least four times a year, to move their animals to new areas for grazing.  So it's really a country that revolves around the needs of its animals – when the cattle feel there's no more food in that valley, their herders have to find new places and a new pastures for them, so people keep moving. 

But these days, almost half of Mongolia's population is living in Ulaanbaatar 

The population in the city is now nearly 1 million (though the official figure may be a bit lower, say 800,000).  We learned that this city was designed for a maximum population of 500,000, but now more and more people are coming to the city.  

Gher areas in Ulaanbaatar

The many newcomers settle in the hilly areas around the city, which is in a big valley.  Now the hills around the city are increasingly carpeted with these informal settlements, which they call the gher areas, named for the ghers which many of these rural migrants put up there.  It is estimated that between 60 and 70% of the city's population stay in these gher areas – a majority of the city's total population. 

The key issue here is the collapse of the socialist system

Mongolia used to be governed under the socialist system, with very close links with the Soviet Union, for which it was a kind of independent protectorate.  We were told that in the later years of the soviet period, soviet support accounted for 30% of the national budget.  Most of the country's political and economic systems were linked to the centralized soviet system, in which the government took care of everybody – providing housing (everybody had a right to a house or apartment), jobs (everyone had the right to a job in the state-owned factories that made everything).  So people were part of a larger social mechanism which looked after everyone.

The collapse of the socialist system has meant a jarring transition from state-welfare, state-provider into the capitalist system

The government has sold off all the factories (whether profitable or not) to private sector entrepreneurs.  Even the state-owned apartments have been sold to the people who live in them.  It's clear that Mongolia's society is having a hard time managing this change.  In the rural areas, the main production activity was livestock, which were raised in cooperatives, with state support.  Now this has changed also.  So the transition from state-driven socialism to market-driven capitalism has brought changes from one end of Mongolia to the other.  In 1990, there was also the change from a single-party political system, to a multi-party one.  Once market forces had their way, suddenly lots of people were without jobs, without housing, without health care, nobody has any money.   And that's partly why so many people are coming into the country's one major city, Ulaanbaatar, to find some way to earn.  On the one hand, these changes have created a more open system, which gives people more freedom to move, to speak, to say what they like.  But at the same time, huge numbers of people are having a very difficult time coping with this new capitalist system, where it's every man for himself, and survival of the fittest. 

Housing "development" today

When you see any new housing developments in Ulaanbaatar, you can be sure it is not workers' housing, it's not subsidized, and it will not be affordable to most of the city's citizens.   With so little money in Mongolia, the government has opened up the country for foreign investment, so most of this kind of speculative, for-profit housing is being built with foreign investment (mostly Japanese and Korean).

Some remnants of a more equitable, human system still exist, however

For instance there is still state support for the elderly in Mongolia – once you turn 60 or 65, you’re eligible to receive a fairly reasonable pension of 35,000 tugrik (about US$ 30) per month. 

A rich country because of so much land

Because Mongolia is still a largely agricultural country, many people do not buy what they eat, but produce it themselves - by growing crops or raising cattle, because they have so much land.  To me, all this land makes Mongolia a very rich country.
The language spoken in Mongolia is not related to Chinese, but is part of the same family of languages as Turkish. 

History of Mongolia (the short version!)

The people in Mongolia are mostly nomadic herdspeople, who are organized into many different tribes, which for centuries have alternatively fought fiercely with each other and enjoyed periods of peaceful coexistence.  In the 12th and 13th century, Mongolia's great warrior leader emerged, and managed to link these scattered and warring tribes into an empire which conquered and ruled over most of Asia and a lot of Europe for almost a century, under three generations of Genghis Khan's descendents.  The Mongols were great soldiers and conquerors, both by land and by sea.

For much of the 20th century, Mongolia's fate was tossed back and forth between it's much larger and more powerful neighbors, Russia on one side, and China on the other, and only achieved its independence from China (and accepted by Russia) in 1946.  After that, the country followed the soviet community party system, and was only converted into a 1-party democratic system in 1990, after the soviet block collapsed.

To this day, the Mongols are a very tough people

You have to be tough to survive in that climate, which is warm in the summers, but freezing (minus 40 degrees!) in the winter, with dramatic temperature swings from day to night.  When we passed the cattle, even the cows and horses and camels are so strong, so fat and so covered with fur!   Enhe said they have to be like that, or they will die in the winter.  Not like Thailand, where our buffaloes and oxen are so small and thin.  And for Thai people, survival is not so difficult:  everywhere is fertile soil, lots of rain, it's always warm, everything grows.  As a result, we're so lazy!  But I look at these harsh climatic conditions in Mongolia as a development factor which makes for this extraordinary strength in the people here :  if people are weak, they'll die. 

The culture of nomadic ways are so deeply rooted in Mongolian psyche

One woman was telling me that there was traditionally no concept of time for these nomads.  One of their poets wrote that We think by ourselves, we live by ourselves, we are on our own, we’re all by ourselves (something like that!).  But it's pretty clear that these are an extremely tough, independent and free people - and their image of themselves is as a free, tough and independent people.  This culture is changing rapidly, though, as more and more people have to go to the city, where living conditions are so much tighter, where systems are more organized, where things have to be more efficient - and where there is definitely a concept of time!  The contrast between these two cultures (the older nomadic culture and the newer urban culture) is very interesting in Mongolia, and we need to find a way to link the two in a healthy way - but this will not be easy to do.  

NEXT - here

Visiting the work of the Urban Development Resource Center NGO   (Ms. Enhe)

What will constitute ACHR's intervention in Mongolia?