ISET Policy Institute (ISET-PI), as a part of the ENPARD project (under the CARE consortium), is involved in the collection and analysis of the market price information of agricultural products around Georgia. ISET-PI, in co-operation with the Ministry of Agriculture of Georgia (MoA) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), organized training for representatives from the MoA’s Information and Consultation Centers (ICC). The training program was intended for price collectors, who collect and enter market price data for more than 100 primary agriculture products into a special website developed under this project. Data is collected from 56 municipalities across Georgia on a weekly basis.

The purpose of MPIS training was to inform price collectors about the upcoming changes in price collection methodology and receive feedback from them on problematic issues they face to minimize possible errors or imperfections in the data.

Within these training sessions, a team consisting of David Zhorzholiani, Lasha Labadze, Irakli Kochlamazashvili (ISET Policy Institute), Giorgi Nozadze, Tatuli Dushuashvili, Nino Shengelia (the MoA), Mikheil Kobakhidze, and Levan Alibegashvili (FAO) delivered the second session of training1 for the MoA’s Information and Consultation Centers (ICC) staff across Georgia. The events took place at ICC’s offices in 9 locations to cover the entirety of the country and were attended by 107 ICC representatives in total (see the details below).

The training plan included (a) presentations on the value of data, (b) a presentation about price collection methodology updates, (c) a Q&A session, (d) a test/exam to assess how productive the training was, and (e) a review of the tests to fix any remaining blind spots. Each training session lasted approximately 4-5 hours and hard copies of presentations and detailed explanations of the MPIS methodology updates, as well as an updated list of agriculture products, were provided for each participant.

The main goal of the training program, delivered under the ENPARD project, was to update/fine-tune the methodology used to eliminate recurring errors in price collection or reporting processes (to increase the reliability of collected data), and to polish the existing.

1 The first round of training across Georgia took place in December 2014.