Goals and Results of the Action :
The project aims at improving conditions for minority involvement in Georgia through support of reforms in the public school system. The overall goal is to adequately increase the participation of the citizens of Georgia in civic life, as well as equal protection of civil, political, ethnic, and religious rights.
Target groups: Target groups will be public schools in the following regions of Georgia: Ajara, Samtskhe-Javakheti, Kvemo Kartli and Imereti. Schoolteachers and members of school boards will be direct beneficiaries, but ethnic and religious minorities will be the ultimate beneficiaries of the project.
Activities:
- Research of ongoing school-level education reforms in minority regions (will be valuable for designing policies on education reforms keeping in mind the interests and concerns of minority communities)
The results of this research will be presented to all major stakeholders (government, international organizations, political parties, NGOs, minority organizations, etc.) and widely publicized;
- Producing a policy paper on school education system and minority integration, that will include analyses of existing challenges and detailed policy recommendations.
- Cultural Diversity Days in Schools (CIPDD will prepare the concept of such event and some guidelines, and it will conduct several pilot events in the Georgian schools.
Preliminary consultation in the Ministry of Education and Science suggests that it may be willing to recommend to the Georgian schools);
- Producing a textbook on religion (According to the concept of the school reform, schools are free to select textbooks, including textbooks to use for religious education classes);
- Accepting Cultural Diversity trainings. It will be further developed based on the study of needs, concerns and expectation of target communities (Training modules will be revised based on results of pilot trainings. Selected representatives of target groups will be given an opportunity to develop their training capacities and they will be used as trainers in the project);
- School boards and administration capacity building in ethnic and religious minority regions. Cooperation: In the course of project implementation
CIPDD will cooperate with other state and non-state actors that are active in the area of civic integration. (Strategic cooperation with the Ministry of Education and Science (MES) is especially important) Among non-state actors, cooperation with International Centre on Conflicts and Negotiations (ICCN) is worth mentioning.
