Some Background on the Georgian PSA The present Population Situation Analysis (PSA) was carried out by the Country Office of UNFPA in Georgia, at the request of the Government Planning & Innovations Unit of the Administration of the Government of Georgia between late July and early November of 2014. UNFPA based itself on the knowledge of national experts regarding the economic, social, institutional, and political situation in the country, through the International School of Economics at Tbilisi State University (ISET), which made three of its collaborators available for the current task:

Mr. Lasha Labadze, Ms. Maka Chitanava and Ms. Nino Doghonadze. For the sections on the reproductive health situation in the country, the study benefitted from the expertise of Ms. Natalia Avaliani. In addition, Mr. Eduard Jongstra, of the Regional Office of UNFPA in Istanbul, and Ms. Gulnara Kadyrkulova, of the Sub-Regional Office in Almaty, participated in the writing of the present document, which was coordinated by an international consultant with ample experience in the conduct of PSAs, Mr. Ralph Hakkert. The international participants visited Tbilisi in the two weeks from 21 July until 1 August, during which interviews were carried out with different government ministries and agencies, international organizations, academic institutions, and NGOs, and relevant data and research documents were collected for analysis. A first draft of the document was prepared in early August, which was subsequently refined with the assistance of the consultants, the UNFPA Country Office, and the Administration of the Government of Georgia.

It is important to emphasize that the present document is based on the methodology for the conduct of PSAs developed by the Population and Development Branch of the Technical Division of UNFPA and contains some of the main elements of the PSA format. It is, however, not a complete PSA as some of the elements of the full methodology are missing. In particular, the present document does not contain chapters on differentials between various social groups and the rights perspective, or about relationships and impacts. Differentials between social groups have been incorporated only in part, in those cases where the relevant information (e.g. differentials between urban and rural areas) was easily available, but no systematic analysis along these lines was performed. The chapter on relationships and impacts (which would normally be Chapter V) was omitted. The reason for these cuts in the contents of the document is that the limited time available for the conclusion of this study did not allow the application of the full PSA methodology. In addition, relatively little secondary analysis of data was carried out. One of the few exceptions is the alternative population projection/estimation presented in Section III.1. It is important to emphasize, that this “PSA Light”, as it has been called, contains some of the analyses that one would typically find in a PSA, but that it should not be taken as representative of the full range of issues that a PSA is expected to address.