International Center on Conflict and Negotiation (ICCN)

Goals of the program Akhalkalaki Social and Marketing Linkages enable to be flexible and to react promptly on the direct needs of our target groups. Within the frameworks of the component of empowering and capacity building our organization – International Center on Conflict and Negotiation (ICCN) revised the intervention strategy and established new vision for priorities in September-October of last year. Our target audience was redefined together with the strategy to work with them.

Our organization strengthens the program’s component of social linkages, which is a significant guarantee of success and development of marketing direction. Our main priorities are to work directly with the community, target groups, farmers’ cooperatives and associations, agricultural service centers and local governance bodies.

Click at the Photo

As for specifics of working with certain targets:

Community

Villages of Akhalkalaki district are distinguished with many peculiarities: ethnically mixed communities, mostly Armenian, traditional mentality of the society, isolation from Georgia for many years (Russian military base in Akhalkalaki and the region’s special status during the Soviet period, isolation), problems with speaking of the Georgian language, inexistence of clear state policy for a long time since independence. Besides, it is important that the agrarian potential of this district has not actually been utilized – economic values, also the main component of the civic integration.

We thoroughly studied each of these issues and we tailored the design of our training and seminars to the perspective of overcoming these problems.

We are working with the community that is either founder or member of the cooperatives created with the program’s support. It is important for us to bring the concept, such as me – a community member, or me – citizen, me – personality, to these people and make them realize these concepts fully. The module for training and seminar is created based on the principles of community development and mobilization, also by considering the experience of other countries as well. With the interactive experience-based method of teaching they identity their own problems and needs themselves, and after that we all work together for finding resources for overcoming them within and outside the community.

Cooperatives

Working with cooperatives is based on a slightly different principle. We empower them by teaching, acknowledging and realizing the particular skills that are necessary for the work. These principles include: teambuilding and working in group, leadership, management, basics of communication, conflict prevention and resolution, raising awareness on gender and importance of women’s participation in the community development process. We think that this strategy has turned out to be quite effective, the cooperative was successful in regards of establishment of the organizational culture and in dereference to the acknowledging the common work.

We are conducting of various types of work with the bodies of local governance: upgrading specific skills and building capacity through trainings and seminars, mediation with the central government by organizing various joint activities, respond to peculiar needs and assistance, providing the community and district development plans developed by us, where the particular agricultural or infrastructure development projects are presented.

Bodies of local governance

We work with the Gamgeoba and Municipality as well. In recent months the territorial proxies became our target. These proxies work with Gamgeoba and represent an important link between the district local governance and the community. Several trainings were held for them: notary, development of civil acts, training on elections. Within the frameworks of our program, and on the basis of the Ministry of Justice, training was held for familiarizing with their authorities for this ministry, Notary Chamber and Civil Registry Agency.

We plan to continue such activities in the future indeed.

We were also involved in solving whole series of problems of the district: ICCN is carrying out a research in reference to rehabilitation of the irrigation canals, which identifies readiness of the local population to make monetary contribution in the process of rehabilitation of irrigation canals.

The second research is aimed at analyzing the vision of consumers, founders and employees of the center, also the program implementing organization, and at identifying the expectation towards the agricultural service center. We have already developed a questionnaire for different focus groups and in the nearest future there the research findings will be ready. The goal is to get the commonly shared strategy of the sustainability of service center before the program comes to an end.

Our nearest plans

ICCN also raised an issue to create legal consultancy center on the basis of the service center, which would on one hand consultation at certain periodicity to the local population and the people involved in farmer’s activities, though, on the other hand, would develop local lawyers, who will be in charge of and lead the legal service of the center after the program is over. In this direction, activities will start in June. In the direction of legal component, and professional lawyers of the Young Lawyers Association will provide partnership in the direction of legal component.

Together with economic parameters, social and civil parameters also play the leading role among the development priorities. Although it is really impossible to measure the achieved result in this direction, all these represent an organic part of the development process.

Shorena Lortkipanidze

Senior Expert of the Program