Participants of Niko Ketskhoveli’s contest celebrate International Forest Day

Georgia: Niko Ketskhoveli’s contest participants celebrate International Forest Day on March 21, 2024. To celebrate this day, around 60 eco-clubs planned greening and clean-up events. Children invited foresters and rangers to the school, who talked about the importance of the forest and the need to protect it.

In various regions (Shida Kartli, Tbilisi, Lower Kartli, Kakheti, Samegrelo-Upper Svaneti, Adjara, Guria, Imereti, Samtskhe-Javakheti and others), it has been planned to arrange squares and place modern waste bins in cooperation with local municipalities. 

The children distributed their handmade flyers, which encouraged citizens to protect the forest and asked for the support of the savings in this important cause. One of the schools of Shida Kartli organized a large-scale carnival. Students created their own carnival masks, which depicted forest dwellers.

The Niko Ketschoveli School Prize has become one of the most important beginnings of informal environmental education for school-age adults in recent years. At different times, more than 1200 public, private, artistic, spiritual, vocational or military schools and tens of thousands of students participated in the award.

The Youth Environmental Competition was founded in 2014 by CENN within the framework of the project Sustainable Forest Management in Georgia, with the financial support of the Austrian Development Cooperation. 

At this time, the prize was held as a photo contest. Students sent photos of flora and fauna as part of the competition. The best works selected by the jury were exhibited at the exhibition, and their authors were awarded prizes.

Since then, the competition has expanded to include the seventeen goals of the UN for sustainable development, which allowed organizers to participate in the competition for schools all over Georgia.

Niko Ketskhoveli’s school prize competition of eco-clubs. Experience has shown that the project provides opportunities to identify and reward outstanding eco-clubs, individual teachers or students and is a continuous process for schools of new opportunities, knowledge acquisition and sharing, personal growth and organizational development.

“Act for Climate” is the call for the award of the year 20234, which will be implemented throughout Georgia during the current academic year. Schools participating in this year’s competition emphasized Sustainable Development Goal 13: “Achieving climate sustainability—urgent action against climate change and its impacts.”

This year’s competition year, implemented by CENN, within the framework of the project “Green Caucasus“, with financial support from the Austrian Development Cooperation (ADC), will offer participants one more novelty, the “Sustainable Development Calendar”: activity implemented under the selected priority goal for each competition month will be evaluated with additional points and appropriate expert support It will be provided. 

The schools with the best performance traditionally compete in regional tours, followed by national tours. Then, at the final stage of the competition, three winners will be selected.

600 school teams have already registered for the 2023 -4 competition. Three hundred twenty-six eco-clubs throughout Georgia are actively working in environmental activities.