EU-funded Bridge for CSOs programme isaimed at helping Armenian CSOs to advance their missions and better serve their beneficiaries, in part through inviting knowledge and skill contribution from the Diaspora.

Facts & Figures

Implementing organisations in Armenia: Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) in partnership with Eurasia Partnership Foundation (EPF).

CRIS number: ENI/2016/151410-1/9

Duration:  34 months | December 2016 – October 2019

Location: All marzes/regions | Republic of Armenia

Objectives

• Strengthen CSOs skills through tailor-made training,
• Provide job consultation to CSOs through pro-bono Diaspora and Armenia-based experts,
• Institutionalise capacity building through introduction of university-based NGO Management Certificate Programme,
• Support CSOs in project implementation through a sub-grant scheme,
• Enroll Goodwill Ambassadors in promotion/advocacy events in the regions of Armenia,
• Bridge local CSOs in Armenia with the Diaspora.

Results

• Held 2 vertical (sector related) trainings, one for NGOs in the Art and Culture, the other in the Education sector,
• Engaged 34 experts from Armenia and Diaspora in consulting CSOs,
• Short-listed a university for NGO Management Certificate Programme,
• Announced 2 grants calls: Innovation for Social Impact Grant and Social Enterprises Scaling up Grant,
• Involved 2 Goodwill Ambassadors: Ervand Zorian for Technovation and Lyuba Serine Tadevosyan for Pahapan Foundation,
• Partnered with UNICEF to co-manage the Diaspora engagement platform Together4armenia.am.

Testimony

BRIDGE programme works to bridge Armenia and the rest of the world, intellectual effort and social reform, people with disabilities and people without.

A team from Karbi in Aragatsotn region in Armenia won People’s Choice Award at the Global Technovation Challenge 2017, an international competition where girls create a mobile app to solve an issue they see in their community. The team of four girls named “One Step Ahead” created an Android sign language app in both English and Armenian and then travelled to San Francisco, the world capital of IT, to present it along with their business plan. Accompanied with colourful illustrations and videos, the app is going to be developed further with the help of USD 10.000 that the team won the competition and will be placed in Google Play Market for free.

The team got inspired to create this app solution after first-handily discovering the need. One of their peers had a visiting relative with hearing impairment. Nobody in the community had the skill or knowledge of sign language to communicate. Thus, the girls got the motivation to make a breakthrough – with a one step forward in creating the android application.

“This challenge played an important role for me especially,” says one of the team members. “I’m a future computer scientist, because I realised how comfortable I feel in this field.”

“Women and Information Society” NGO, the organisation that brought the annual Technovation Challenge to Armenia, aims to contribute to the integration of Armenian girls and women into the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector that now has a 1:7 ratio of men to women internationally and 1:2 in Armenia. The dedicated educators across the country, some of whom have to learn coding from scratch, and then teach their students and this achievement of the girls from Karbi show the rich multi-faceted potential of Armenia’s women in the emerging and globally equalising field of Information Technologies.