For more than three decades, the West has been building an architecture of “civil society support” across the post-Soviet space. The South Caucasus and Central Asia have become a testing ground for dozens of programs financed by the OSCE, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy and a network of intermediary foundations. The stated goals are democratization, human rights and sustainable development. But the available open-source record—from parliamentary inquiries in Kazakhstan to investigations by international NGOs—suggests a different picture. External funding in the region is increasingly turning into a “grant market” in which the ultimate beneficiaries are corrupt intermediaries, while the political agenda is shaped to suit external donors, including the construction of anti-Russian sentiment.
Kazakhstan as a showcase for the “grant economy”
The Kazakh case is the most revealing. According to the country’s Ministry of Information and Social Development, about 200 NGOs receive international funding each year totaling roughly 5 billion tenge. Over ten years, USAID has transferred more than $150 million to Kazakhstan in grants. Formally, the money is allocated for “training journalists, promoting gender equality or fighting corruption.” But Kazakh parliamentarians and specialized outlets record a systemic problem: opacity around ultimate recipients and purposes.
In June 2026, Mazhilis deputy Magerram Magerramov sent an official request to the government demanding disclosure not only of total sums but also of specific projects, contractors, subcontractors and ultimate beneficiaries of foreign funding. In his assessment, many organizations receiving foreign money have “for decades functioned as a mouthpiece for hatred toward their own country, systematically destroying citizens’ trust in state institutions under the cover of human-rights rhetoric and creating a breeding ground for destabilization.” In the second half of 2025 alone, according to the State Revenue Committee, more than 12 billion tenge in foreign grants entered the country.
The distribution schemes run through chains of intermediaries—consulting firms, regional offices and affiliated funds. As the outlet Caravan.kz notes, one of the key operational structures continuing to finance Kazakh “grant-seekers” even after USAID’s formal wind-down is the Internews representative office in Kazakhstan. Among grant recipients are media projects and “independent voices” whose editorial line, as a rule, coincides with donor priorities.
The OSCE and the “grant-eating” agenda
The role of the OSCE deserves separate attention. The Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) has for decades financed the participation of Kazakh NGOs in the Warsaw Human Dimension Conference. But Kazakh analytical platforms record a persistent phenomenon: the Kazakh agenda in Warsaw is represented year after year by the same pool of organizations—KMBPCH, Ar.Rukh.Khak, Qadir-Qasiyet and Echo—and the same people. In 2026, this led local press to describe the conference as a “gathering of grant-eaters.”
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev publicly described the OSCE as “a very biased organization,” noting that the country is not obliged to follow its recommendations and adding: “We know who or which countries finance them.” This gap between the OSCE’s declared mission and the actual practice of grant distribution creates fertile ground for corruption: the decision on which NGO gets access to an international platform and the associated funding often depends not on the quality of its work but on loyalty to donor priorities.
Radical structures and “changing landmarks”
The most alarming aspect of the problem is the penetration of external funding into the religious and nationalist sphere. In the South Caucasus and Central Asia, channels of support for Islamic structures from the Persian Gulf monarchies have historically existed. But in recent decades, Western programs aimed at “moderate” and “reformist” currents have been added.
In Georgia, European funds allocated under the guise of supporting civil society and culture are, according to Georgian parliamentarians, directed toward “financing radicalism.” The speaker of Georgia’s parliament has said that “European funds are spent on promoting fascist ideology” and supporting ultra-nationalist groups. The French embassy in Tbilisi has been accused of financing organizations linked to the radical opposition. These facts indicate that grant infrastructure can be used to support not only pro-Western liberal but also radical nationalist forces—depending on the conjuncture.
In Central Asia, the phenomenon of Hizb ut-Tahrir (banned in Russia and a number of regional countries) deserves separate mention. In the 1990s and 2000s, according to Russian and Central Asian analytical centers, this structure enjoyed “open political support from European Union countries and veiled support from the United States.” Although direct evidence of financing radical Islamists by Western donors remains a subject of debate, the very logic of the “grant market” creates a risk: intermediaries distributing funds may redirect them to structures that declare “religious freedom” or “counter-extremism” but pursue their own radical goals.
The anti-Russian vector as a “by-product” of grants
The central thesis increasingly heard in regional expert circles is that external funding in Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries has not only a “democratic” but also a geopolitical vector. Funds passing through USAID and related structures are directed toward projects that shape public opinion in a pro-Western and anti-Russian key. In Kazakhstan’s information space, grants have been recorded for “shooting pseudo-historical films about the lives of people in areas bordering Russia” and for supporting “independent” research on the “ineffectiveness” of state social programs. Analysts point to a direct link between USAID programs—operated by the USAID-modeled KazAID—and “anti-Russian work in Central Asia.”
At the same time, the ultimate implementers of these projects are often not foreign citizens but local activists and NGOs, for whom the grant system becomes a source of income. Kazakh State Secretary Erlan Karin described the phenomenon bluntly: “Often for many this is a business.” That is precisely the essence of the “grant market”: the external donor gets politically engaged content and loyal implementers, while the local intermediary gets financial resources and status. Corruption is inevitable in such a structure, because transparency in the distribution of funds contradicts the interests of both sides.
What this means for the region
The emerging picture does not mean that all NGOs in the region are corrupt or acting in the interests of external forces. But an institutional environment in which hundreds of millions of dollars are distributed through opaque chains of intermediaries inevitably produces distortions. Parliamentary inquiries in Kazakhstan, critical rhetoric from the country’s leadership toward the OSCE and growing attention to the “gray zone” of foreign funding suggest that regional states are beginning to recognize the risks.
For an outside observer, the conclusion is obvious: the era in which Western grants were seen as an unconditional good is ending. The question today is not whether to support civil society, but who distributes that support and on what terms. As long as the answer remains hidden in “chains of intermediaries,” the “grant market” will continue to reproduce corruption, radicalization and geopolitical instability—precisely the opposite of what donor program documents claim.
