On 29 November, the European Union in Armenia and Open Society Foundations Armenia summed up the results of the two-year grant project entitled Pursuing Positive Change through Empowering Civil Society.
The Project was financed by the European Union and implemented by the Open Society Foundations Armenia in collaboration with two partner organizations – the Institute of Public Policy and the Union of Informed Citizens NGO. The Project aimed to increase the monitoring and advocacy capacity of Armenian civil society organizations with a view to achieving positive change in the areas of human rights, criminal justice, and equity. The Project targeted new and more recently established human rights organisations to support them in better monitoring, documenting, and reporting human rights violations in the aforementioned areas. 
In the framework of the Project, more than 75 young people from different parts of Armenia had the opportunity of interacting with experienced civil society organizations, and acquiring new knowledge and skills for organizing and implementing monitoring and advocacy campaigns. Around 50 journalists were trained in proper coverage of the results of the advocacy of human rights organizations. Young people’s organizations and journalists received sub-grants to carry out projects related to these topics.
“Civil society scrutiny is an important aspect in a functional democracy. This project has reached out to a younger generation of journalists, researchers, civil society organizations, activists and has worked successfully their scrutiny of public policies, improving data collection and monitoring techniques with a view to have an evidence-based policy dialogue. I expect Armenian civil society to invest a lot in such work over the next years and we welcome you to scrutinize the work of the European Union and the CEPA implementation too,” said Andrea Wiktorin, the EU Ambassador to Armenia, head of the EU Delegation to Armenia at the final conference of the EU-funded Project.
Summing up the results of the Project, Open Society Foundations Armenia Executive Director Larisa Minasyan emphasized that the Project had been launched prior to the Velvet Revolution, when Armenia was in a totally different situation: “Prior to the Revolution, civil society’s work with respect to human rights protection focused mostly on the monitoring of violations. The previous regime denied the existence of violations of rights. The findings of the monitoring of violations of rights were very diverse, processed through a variety of methodologies and criteria, which enabled reinforcing and widely disseminating that denial. This Project brings together a number of elements and provides knowledge, data, capacity, and skills to young human rights activists, researchers, and journalists,” said OSF Armenia’s director.
Within the project, a Knowledge Hub was established at the Institute of Public Policy, which contains methodological handbooks and a database intended for civil society organizations’ monitoring and advocacy work. This platform is an open source of information and knowledge for the effective organization of evidence-based advocacy by human rights organizations. Avetik Mejlumyan, the director of the Institute of Public Policy, believes that the Project has helped to solve the problem of capacity development of human rights organizations and collecting and presenting the results of their efforts in one place. “We tried to create a platform that will bring together data and present it in a holistic context. The Project helps civil society to find a new language of communication with the general public in order to present the reforms and the existing problems,” he said.
The Union of Informed Citizens non-governmental organizations, which is one of the implementing partners in this Project, organized a media campaign to present the monitoring and advocacy efforts of Armenia’s human rights organizations and to raise public awareness of the work carried out in these areas. The organization’s programs coordinator Daniel Ioannisyan said that, while it was easy for civil society to pinpoint the omissions of the authorities prior to the Revolution, civil society’s mission after the Revolution is not only to speak up about the problems, but also to propose solutions. “It is essential to ensure links between civil society and the public at large, because for years and years, wider society was uninformed of the problems that existed in the country and could not receive alternative views and positions on the situation. In this sense, the Project has generated logical change,” said Ioannisyan.
The Project was implemented between January 2018 and December 2019. The total budget of the Project was 460,000 euros.