It’s evening in Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan, and a long queue of women and children is standing outside an elite residential complex. They’re waiting for the glass doors of an office to open. The office is unusual. It has no furniture but contains an assortment of children’s scooters, bicycles and toys. A dozen sewing machines line the walls.
“This is our Centre for Adaptation and Resocialisation for Large Families,” activist Botagoz Shynykulova tells me as she unlocks the door. “We only recently opened it.”
Eight families live in the centre. Some lost their homes in fires, others moved from the countryside. What unites these women is their part in a militant new protest movement in Kazakhstan. They are mothers with large families and are fighting to get decent housing and social benefits from the state.
