On June 21, 2019, ISET’s Rati Kochlamazashvili moderated the Farmers’ Congress, which took place at the Hualing Hotel in Tbilisi. The congress discussed the Challenges and Opportunities of Strengthening Market Linkages for Smallholder Farmers.

‘There are two types of people’ is the common opening for a number of jokes and idioms, but as research carried out by ISET alumnus Ala Avoyan (now of the University of Indiana) shows, there is some truth to this old adage.

On May 3, the US-based World Resource Initiative (WRI) published ‘How to Enable Electric Bus Adoption In Cities Worldwide’, which examines the process of adopting e-buses in sixteen case study cities. Tbilisi City Hall took the first couple of steps necessary to introduce the first electric bus in 2018 and is expected to scale up the number to 200 from 2020.

The cost of cooking one standard Imeretian khachapuri in May 2019 averaged 3.24 GEL, which is approximately 2.4% higher compared to May 2018 (year-on-year), and 6.4% lower compared to the previous month (April 2019).

In technological terms, there has never been a better time to be a small or medium size business owner: people can always get ahold of you and you can work wherever you need to. Creating an additional source of income catches people’s interests all over the world; as additional motivation, we often hear about the launch of yet another program directly helping these businesses, thus making it easier to become a start-upper. And here, the rhetorical question: “why not?!” pops into some people’s minds.