While analyzing our last four years of local resource mobilization, I was admittedly surprised at the results. From 2011 to 2014, the economic growth rate of Mongolia dropped by 10%, but the funding my organization, the Mongolian Women's Fund (MONES), received from corporate donors increased sevenfold. Despite the economy’s rapid decline, our resource mobilization from the private sector has dramatically increased.
In early 2012, the World Bank called Mongolia the “fastest growing economy in Asia” due to its whopping growth rate of 17.3%. In fact, World Bank data on annual GDP growth in 2011 shows that Mongolia was the second fastest growing economy in the world, just after Macao. During these years, the country welcomed a huge foreign investment in its mining sector. Money flooded the country and Mongolian businesses, big and small, thrived with many opportunities.
Corporations opened their doors to solicitations from the disadvantaged, extending their giving through corporate social responsibility initiatives. While there is no data to show where these donations are going or for whom, since 2011 the tide has been slowly shifting. Many kindergartens and schools in urban slums and remote rural areas, hospitals and orphanages now receive assistance. In 2013, for example, Mongolian Consulting Services, a national company that operates in several sectors, donated a full set of emergency medical equipment to a children’s hospital in the Bayanzurkh district of Ulaanbaatar. In another example, a construction company, Jiguur Grand, paid for expensive surgery for an impoverished 12-year old boy to recover his vision in a South Korean hospital. A handful of corporations donated to NGOs for rights-based initiatives, but these were exceptions.
