
In mid-July 2020, USAID’s Digital APEX program awarded a contract to Agenda to provide specialized training to political parties in Georgia in the run-up to that country’s general election scheduled for that October. The objective was to build capacity within Georgian political parties in various aspects of communications, including disinformation, social media usage, and crisis management. The contract was intended to complement work then being undertaken by the Georgian office of the International Republican Institute (IRI) to strengthen the institutional capacity of political parties and so equip them to contest the elections more effectively. Despite the logistical challenges created by the advent of the global pandemic, which had delayed the start of the APEX program in Georgia, our team developed a series of remote and hybrid learning modules to ensure participation among eight opposition parties. Our program leveraged the complementary experience of our Georgia Team Lead, a local training expert, and the expertise of Agenda’s US-based team for reach-back support, to develop tailored trainings based on international best practices and appropriate to the Georgian context. Our team coordinated closely with those parties to develop a schedule that maximized flexibility, while also ensuring the trainings occurred with sufficient time to deliver value to those participants prior to the elections. In total, we trained 80 individuals from across eight participating parties on the essentials of each discipline with follow-up online survey instruments delivered to each participant. Based on the results of those surveys, there was strong validation on the effectiveness of the trainings and a clear indication that participants would welcome follow-up training opportunities. Seven of the eight parties subsequently won election to Parliament in the October 2020 elections and APEX considered the Georgia program a model performance. A potential second phase is currently being considered to expand the work to support municipal elections to be held in 2021.