Secondary School Education in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia to contribute to the prevention of trafficking in persons

The two year regional project implemented by IOM with financial support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) aims at developing and distributing educational materials that will increase the understanding of the dangers of trafficking in persons, realities of migration and awareness of available preventive support mechanisms among secondary school students, their teachers, and parents in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia through and within the local educational institutions, thus contributing to the prevention of trafficking in persons from the South Caucasus. The project is implemented by IOM. By means of a specifically developed educational module, teachers will be trained to conceptualize the risks of trafficking and capacitated to transfer this knowledge to colleague teachers and school pupils aged 15 to 17, thus giving information on available preventive support mechanisms and teaching preventive measures to be taken on an individual basis.

This regional project intends to enhance the capacities of the Ministries of Education of the three target countries to address the problem of trafficking in line with the national action plans to combat trafficking in persons and aims at developing structures through which the inclusion of trafficking into the national secondary school curricula can be facilitated.

To ensure the sustainability of the project, IOM and its partners will build the capacity of key officials within the target Ministries of Education to produce and integrate a culture-sensitive educational kit on trafficking in the national curricula of secondary schools of the three target countries. The project will apply a participatory approach and thus give a high degree of ownership to the main stakeholders. Governmental as well as non-governmental partners will be closely involved in the design of the methodology, the development of the curriculum, the training of the teachers and the evaluation of the project. The programme will be carried out over a period of two years (November 2008 – October 2010). It is envisaged that by the end of the project IOM will have targeted 20 percent of all secondary schools and other educational institutes and will have integrated an anti-trafficking module into the school curricula of the three target countries.