Kindergarten opens in Gurdzemi after advocacy by women farmers

For almost 35 years now, no child has ever gone to a kindergarten in the village of Gurdzemi in Martvili Municipality, located in Georgia’s western region of Samegrelo-Zemo Svaneti. The kindergarten was closed in the 1990s and has not been reopened since.

“I don’t recall having a kindergarten in Gurdzemi or in the neighbouring villages,” notes 26-year-old Ana Jgerenaia, a farmer from Gurdzemi. “This problem has been bothering us for a long time. In addition to the fact that kindergarten education is important for children’s development, its absence has also hindered the women’s development and their lives here. Many of them do not have a child carer, so it is difficult for them to find time for study or work - or simply for themselves.”

To help solve this problem, Ana studied the needs of her fellow villagers with her mother, Mtvarisa Kekutia, last year and then began to actively advocate for them.

Ana’s activism stemmed from her participation in the Farmer Field School project, which launched in Gurdzemi in 2020 with the support of UN Women and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Mtvarisa was a Farmer Field School leader, and the project participant women usually gathered in her house to learn about international standards for food safety and food insecurity, modern cheese production technologies, entrepreneurship, leadership and business management. In addition, with the support of UN Women, they also learned about gender equality and women’s rights, so that they could later share this knowledge with their fellow villagers.

UN Women also collaborated with a local organization, the NEFA Foundation, whose representatives conducted trainings on civic engagement, activism and volunteerism for the participants of the Farmer Field School. During these meetings, women learned how to identify community needs, how to present them to local governments and how to advocate for solving existing challenges.

“NEFA helped us develop a questionnaire for the needs assessment,” Ana explains. “Then we distributed it to our fellow villagers on Facebook and collected information about the problems. Some wanted to open an outpatient clinic. Some wanted to open a library, which made me very happy. Some were also worried about the lack of water. But for most, the lack of a kindergarten was especially painful.”

After identifying the needs, Ana engaged with the municipality leadership, continued to advocate for the problem and achieved results: Last year, construction of a kindergarten began in Gurdzemi. In preparation, local teachers have completed respective retraining courses in Senaki. Gurdzemi residents expect construction to be completed soon, and after almost 35 years, the kindergarten will enrol local children. Ana hopes that children from neighbouring villages will also attend the kindergarten, which will be a great benefit for the women there.

“We women did not know how to advocate and prepare petitions,” Ana says. “NEFA and the project helped us with all of this, and we also discovered many interesting findings. I also learned at the Farmer Field School how important the existence of kindergartens is for women—for their employment, for their education.” Ana is now a community worker at the Taso Foundation and continues to advocate for the problems of her fellow villagers.

The Farmer Field School initiative was part of the joint UN Women-FAO project “Fostering Economic Empowerment of Women Farmers by Supporting Homemade Dairy Production through the Farmer Field School (FFS) Approach”. It was implemented in the Samegrelo-Zemo Svaneti region from 2020 to 2024 with the financial support of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).