Rustavi, the City of Innovations

September 2017 by Revaz Barbakadze

The first design thinking workshop in Rustavi with City Hall, UNDP Georgia and PSDA Service Lab

A year ago, when we started Participatory Local Budgeting Project in the city of Rustavi I had enough experience and knowledge of how to work with citizens, what kind of questions I had to ask them in order to deliver the right messages to the decision-makers.

However, taking into consideration past experience, I realized that in this project I could do more interesting activities going beyond traditional meetings, questionnaires and even big public surveys. I had to find something else.

And a new idea appeared — why don’t we make this project a starting point for turning Rustavi a city of governance innovations to establish, test and refine various methods of innovation and possibly replicate in the region, country and abroad.

The Mayer supported this idea and we started. We started by looking at governance innovations in Georgia and noticed that all of them were introduced at the national level. What is the reason for this is a separate blog topic, but where we saw the need was to replicate them at the local governance level.

When we were in the process of drafting Rustavi Open Governance and Budgeting strategic document, UNDP Istanbul Regional Hub launched “Futuremakers” project in Rustavi, in cooperation with UNDP Georgia and Edgeryders, in parallel to initiatives conducted in Armenia and Egypt. It aimed at creating an interface between ‘networked youth’ and local governance facilitating youth engagement in decision-making, their development and opportunities for reducing brain drain of the city.

What was unusual in the approach of launching this initiative was the engagement of Rustavi Mayor’s office from the development stage of the project, together with UNDP Georgia staff working on innovations and local governance, which allowed us to understand the specifics of the work ahead and plan activities accordingly.

It was especially important to start partnership with the UNDP staff involved in public sector innovation and Innovations Service Lab of the Ministry of Justice, which allowed us to build on each-other’s capacity and complement each other, instead of duplicating, at the same time, giving Rustavi access to international partnerships and networks, like Edgeryders.

Our first joint event was to co-design interior of the Citizen Service Centers to be constructed in Rustavi. We decided to involve our citizens to identify the internal designs and functions of these centers.

On 5th of May, 2017 Rustavi brought together several groups of local residents, university students, persons with disabilities, women groups and Mayor’s Office front and back office workers to come up with a concept of inner design of centers to create a customer-oriented environment in these buildings. It was the first Design Thinking workshop in Rustavi facilitated by UNDP Innovation Specialist and PSDA ServiceLab.