GRANTEE SPOTLIGHT INTERVIEW: NANA JANASHIA, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AT CAUCASUS ENVIRONMENTAL NGO NETWORK (CENN)
Nana Janashia is a professional environmental scientist with over twenty-five years of working experience in the fields of environment protection, natural resources management, and sustainable development. She is a founder and an Executive Director of one of the strongest regional NGOs in the South Caucasus region — Caucasus Environmental NGO Network (CENN), working on both policy as well as grassroots levels in the region.
Since its establishment in 1998, Caucasus Environmental NGO Network (CENN) has continued its voluntary efforts to establish a regional working partnership in cooperation with environmental organizations in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia through a wide variety of projects. Can you tell us more about the origins of CENN and why it was started?
CENN’s origins can be traced back to 1998 — a very different time by all accounts, soon after Georgian independence. I returned from studying at Central European University in Budapest and a project had just begun to create an environmental NGO Network for communication between Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The foundation of this was the idea that the Caucasus is one ecosystem — to consider that it is an eco-region. So with these developments in 1998, we were functioning more like a grassroots organization, shadow monitoring and shadow reporting.
In 2003, during the Rose Revolution in Georgia, we decided to focus on Georgia in particular. After reviewing our mission, we chose to become a development-oriented organization and to promote sustainable development, values, and practices in the region. We have a very broad scope, working on civil society development and institutional strengthening, as well as good governance; we do research and policy work, consult with the private sector on compliance management and focus on raising awareness and communication.
CENN now has two core directions: 1) environmental protection and the sustainable management of resources, natural resources and energy; 2) climate change and disaster risk reduction policies. We work on the green economy, promoting green entrepreneurship and we also promote European approaches to rural development and socio-economic development. In general, we are active in forestry, waste management, land degradation, watershed management, climate change, and disaster risk reduction and we have projects on youth engagement in green social enterprises.
For more than 20 years, CENN has been implementing projects supported by various development partners working in the South Caucasus in a wide range of areas including combating climate change, sustainable management of resources, building and developing healthy and prosperous climate-resilient communities, and empowering women and girls to participate in creating inclusive solutions. What are some of the CENN milestones since its founding?
Many accomplishments come to mind. For example, we started Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) in 2007 when no one was considering these issues — now we have a mailing list dedicated to DRR that has more than 30,000 subscribers. I think our ongoing projects with schools have been an important milestone for CENN as well — we work with about 1,000 schools, supporting the youth in engaging with essential environmental and social issues. We established a nationwide annual competition for schools that over time have come to focus on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and throughout the year, pupils carry out important and invaluable work that tackles environmental and social issues in their communities.
Our green camps also deserve special attention. The camps take place in our training centre that offers the youth informal education and skills development in many different fields. Many young people have completed our green camps and have subsequently become “CENN alumni.”
Another major project was our work with waste management legislation: We developed 16 waste management plans for 16 municipalities and the city of Tbilisi. The waste management plan was developed by the City Hall and it was approved by the Tbilisi Council.
On a policy level, we have achieved a lot. One example are the several educational programs curricula we initiated for several universities in Georgia and Armenia that are related to a circular economy, green innovation, rural development, renewable energy, energy efficiency, and forests. These topic areas became a mandatory part of the curricula.
Finally, we have also worked on some large EU projects on rural development with their sub-granting program. One of the most recent projects was the EU-supported Keda LEADER project and the ongoing Embrace Tsalka project. We worked to create a local action group in both municipalities that is responsible for creating a local development plan. In Keda, we funded around 100 local entrepreneurs and social projects in tourism, eco-tourism, education, and agriculture. Our biggest legacy is to support the development of an economic ecosystem and activate local community in becoming decision-makers and putting together a development plan.
More generally, I would say the biggest achievement has been the level of confidence in us that we notice from the state, private sector, and communities that we work with. This has been a really essential part of our success.
As one of the USAID EDGE grantees, together with your partner from Armenia, you are implementing the Digital Caucasus Project aiming to contribute to the digital transformation of SMEs for smart economic growth in the Caucasus tourism sector. What kind of project activities are being implemented in order to achieve the desired outcome?
The Digital Caucasus Project promotes the online presence of the Caucasus region by creating a Caucasus Tourist Destination Portal, targeted at creating and sustaining strategic partnerships between regional and local authorities in the target areas and national administrations active in tourism areas.
The project is largely about providing tailored support to SMEs. We conducted a careful gap analysis to offer needs-based support. We established strong regional partnerships and worked a lot on SMEs capacity development, so that they can develop new products to meet global trends.
We try to achieve this through the following guidelines:
· Positioning the Caucasus region as a unique tourist destination using modern ICT tools;
· Improving the SMEs business sophistication by promoting ICT tools and e-commerce solutions and the digital transformation in the sustainable tourism value chain;
· Improving market integration and expanding linkages for SMEs by improving the services of business associations, Caucasus online marketing campaigns, and women and youth engagement.
Some of the activities that have already yielded strong results were in capacity building, such as trainings in areas like ICT, marketing, management enhancement, product development, and workforce development. We conducted business-to-business match-making which helped the SMEs expand their business relationships, whilst also learning from successful leading businesses.
Through the match-making tactic, we brought together ICT firms and SMEs from sustainable tourism in order to develop ICT applications that address their needs.
Furthermore, we are working to improve the SMEs market integration through service development, branding and marketing, as well as helping them improve business operations. We recently organized an international conference that, among other things, also focused on sustainable tourism, which was followed by an exposition of social and green tourism including those operating in sustainable tourism.
Throughout its implementation, the Digital Caucasus Project will catalyze strong regional partnerships and will forge new alliances between SMEs in the Caucasus region to promote sustainable and resilient tourism that will mitigate future risks. Could you tell us how this is going to be achieved? What is the role of the Caucasus Tourist Destinations Portal and when can we expect the portal to become available to the public?
By establishing the Caucasus Tourist Destination Portal we are promoting and supporting the much-needed online presence of the Caucasus region. The project aims to create and sustain strategic partnerships between regional and local authorities in the target areas and national administrations active in tourism area.
We believe that slow, sustainable tourism that supports regeneration of our environment and economy is the way forward. Thus, our portal offers exactly the type of experiences, destinations, and activities that are in line with this vision.
The Caucasus Tourist Destinations Portal, provides a single-entry point giving access to all Caucasus tourism information. The portal includes the general tourist information about Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, including natural and cultural attractions, recommendations on destinations for eco, adventure, rural, wine and culinary tourism, accommodation and activities, as well as presents interesting and responsible tourism businesses offers to visitors and sustainable tourism products.
We tried to make the portal not only user-friendly but also business-friendly. For example, the portal features tourism businesses from Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan and links their profiles with relevant booking platforms, which helps them to boost their businesses online and increase their sales and export. In addition, the portal is linked with relevant national websites to provide up-to-date tourist information, facilitate and increase the number of visitors to tourist sites.
The current COVID-19 pandemic has created a plethora of global challenges, economic and healthcare crises and posed spillover impacts on global industries, in particular tourism and travel. Please, tell us more about how COVID-19 has impacted your organization and how you are coping with it.
This is a particularly interesting question, I am certain not just for us but for anyone working to protect the environment. The COVID-19 pandemic has once more reinstated the fragility of not only our environment but our dependency on it.
Our challenge was to quickly and effectively adapt to this unprecedented situation. CENN swiftly refocused its efforts to respond to the crisis caused by the pandemic and carried out activities to help slow the spread of COVID-19 in target regions and also to help vulnerable communities to protect themselves and adapt to the situation created by the pandemic. The work for us has doubled if not tripled. We quickly understood the severity of the spill-over impact this crisis would have and refocused our funds and activities to mitigate these risks not just in tourism, but also in health and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH).
For example, due to Georgia’s strong dependency on tourism, we knew that this sector would be hit the hardest. We launched crisis response grants and provided support to enterprises working in tourism to innovate and adapt their services. We promoted and campaigned domestic tourism and looked towards further services digitization.
We also focused on developing tourist packages tailored to the restrictions and limitations during the pandemic.
The pandemic made the world shift everything to be online, thus the Digital Caucasus Project is responding to much of the challenges posed. It supports SMEs to become integrated into the digital world and keep up with the modern trends.
