Economic development of the municipalities (outside capital) is one of the key sustainable development challenges in Georgia. The capital city of Tbilisi, while accounting for nearly 1/3 of the country’s population generates 50% of GDP and keeps expanding, whereas the municipalities, with few exceptions, are losing population and suffering from high incidence of poverty, unemployment, and slow and weak economic development.

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.

Our latest online presentation highlighted women’s rights in Georgia and crucially considered their role in employment, childcare, and within society. ISET began research on our latest regulatory impact assessment (RIA) in 2019 and concluded at the end of last year, the subject brought to light many significant points relating to female economic empowerment and parental leave.