On March 1, the ISET Policy Institute and USAID Economic Governance Program hosted a roundtable discussion on "Labor Market Challenges and Prospects" in Batumi.

Under the Georgian Constitution, the country's strategic objective is to join the European Union. The vast majority of citizens agree with and support this objective. The European future is not only the country's historical strategic choice but also the hope for the prosperity and well-being of the country's population and the promise of a better future for future generations.

The "Local Economic Development (LED) in Georgia" project, implemented by a consortium led by HELVETAS and commissioned by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), aims to strengthen Georgian actors’ involvement in LED. Moreover, it incorporates an overarching objective “to contribute to increasing employment and income of rural women and men in their localities by enhancing effective collaboration among local and national actors (public, private, civil society) for the creation of new economic opportunities.”

The goal of the vocational education support programme is to promote the socioeconomic integration of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and ecomigrants and improve their living conditions by creating employment prospects, and it aims to do so by promoting the vocational education of IDPs and ecomigrants in order to increase their competitiveness in the labour market.

The World Health Organization’s declaration of Covid-19 as a pandemic on March 11, 2020, can be considered a watershed in the recent history of mankind. The pandemic and its concomitant changes, such as switching to remote activities, affected different aspects of one’s life, including individuals’ participation in and behavior on the labor market. Georgia was no exception in this respect. The unprecedented nature of the crisis brought about unprecedented consequences for the country’s already vulnerable labor market.