Programme evaluation 

The „Complex evaluation of the Czech Official Development Assistance supporting human rights, democracy and societal transformation in Georgia“ was commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic. This sectoral (programme) evaluation covered 5 Czech projects and a number of best practices of other donors. It was undertaken by Inka Pibilova, Monika Přibylová and Elene Margvelashvili in 2014. 

Key conclusions 

• The process of trainings – miniprojects – mentoring by experienced staff – celebrating projects´ successes has proven successful in short-term engagement of civil society organisations and youth. 
• Subsequent engagement was strong mainly among well-established CSOs with diversified funding.
• The long-term involvement of local authorities´ representatives in miniprojects had a positive effect on their cooperation with youth and CSOs – 3 towns developed own action plans for youth engagement.
• Concrete changes in media quality and plurality, to which media trainings or summer schools would have contributed, are not clear.
• Debate competitions were proven popular among students and teachers. They contributed to new pieces of knowledge and skills among students.
• Study visits of target groups to the CR had negligible effects except of rolling out debates to more schools.
• The projects benefited approximately 4.000 citizens. Still, they did not contribute to a major increase of public influence on decision making. Main reasons are too many focus areas and short-term involvement of target groups.
• A donor-dependency mind-set was created – a lot of CSOs believe they need to raise funds before engaging.
• The multi-stakeholder approach in Guria and Imereti is currently being replicated in other regions with the support of international donors, which is a big success. 

Read the full reports and 26 case studies 

The full evaluation report and a short summary is available in Czech here, and in English here. Photo by Elene Margvelashvili.