Duration: April 2009-March 2010

The youth of Azerbaijan have long been plagued by complacency, ignorance and lack of resources and our project has striven and strives to make them more aware of their surroundings and the power they have for positive change. In the previous 2 years with the support from National Endowment for Democracy through Sheki Youth Information Center and Civic Awareness Program, we have made great strides in educating Sheki youth on civic responsibility. The current year, as continuation of 2008-2009 we are propose to include information sessions and documentary film days, public awareness, teacher trainings in 10 surrounding villages of Sheki and Gakh, summer school for students from Sheki-Zagatala region and continue young journalist program, considering gender equality.

Project Objectives

• Educate youth on political, world and civic issues and expand their minds about situations outside of their communities.
• To boost political participation and civil awareness of youth in rural areas and create a place where they can speak their minds and take active roles in their community.
• To foster widespread youth interest in politics through journalism, modern information technologies and free press.

Component 1: Information sessions and documentary movie days

Every week there is a information session where young people learn about different ways of fostering their education and careers, opportunities on cultural and educational exchanges abroad and within the country, and for this matter representatives from various educational institutions such as American Councils and International Exchange Board will be asked to provide information for further use.

In addition, we have a monthly documentary movie day with follow-up group discussions. These have been very successful in the past 2 years due to the quality of films we have been able to bring in. Participants of the program have shown great interest to these sessions, always involving other students in Sheki. This is one of the most popular programs provided by the Center and we hope to continue it in the coming year.

Component 2: Civic and political awareness training in rural schools

This component strives to train 20-25 teachers from each of the 10 schools in 10 surrounding villages of Sheki and Gakh (as 5 schools to be chosen from Sheki and 5 from Gakh). A total of about 300 teachers will be educated by Uluchay trainers on how to incorporate and stress the importance of civic and political awareness into their curriculums and help them to form political/ social clubs in their schools as it was done in year 2008-2009. Our goal is to educate them and help them take an active hand in politics through participation in these youth clubs.

Component 3: Young Journalists Program

During this component was held training session on journalism for 19 youth interested. The selected group participated course taught by Khanim Javadova, a student GIPA. She has more than 5 years of experience as a journalist and trainers, working both in the Khazar TV and Azadlig radio as a part of the course the student have to publish a monthly newsletter and work on blog site (www.shekiblog.org ). The content of the blog and the newsletter focuses on current events and politics of Sheki, as reported by the young journalists. As a result of Young Journalist Progam the participants gained broad information on news, writing mechanism of profile, kinds of news, how to write a good article, web casting, blogs and ways of creating personal blogs, new media and the situation of new media in Azerbaijan.