British Council Launches ‘Creative Spark’ across Central Asia, South Caucasus

The British Council is pleased to announce the launch of ‘Creative Spark’, a five year program to help develop the creative economy across Central Asia and the South Caucasus, with an inward visit to the UK.

The program will be run from seven countries: Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. In order to support higher education reform and to respond to unemployment rates in the region, the British Council will use the UK’s experience in entrepreneurship education to design and deliver the program which aims to support over 10,000 students in its first year.

To kick off the program, a delegation of deputy minsters, university leaders and creative enterprise experts from these countries are on a visit to the United Kingdom during the week of 25 June.

The Georgian delegation is being represented by three members: Levan Kharatishvili, Deputy Minister of Culture and Sport; Ana Riaboshenko, Director Creative Georgia and Tamta Shavgulidze, Main Specialist Quality Control Department, Tbilisi State Arts Academy.

The program includes visits to UK universities (University of Goldsmith, Norwich University of Arts, University of East Anglia, Cambridge University, Coventry University, University of Leicester, Loughborough University) and creative institutions. The Prime Minister's Trade Envoy, Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Emma Harriet Nicholson) will also meet the delegation.

The Creative Spark program has three main aims:

• To establish enterprise centers in 20 universities across the seven partner countries in partnership with UK universities;

• To deliver enterprise skills training to students and creative entrepreneurs, ranging from pitching ideas to starting a business and protecting intellectual property;

• To deliver a range of new online English courses and new MOOC courses focused on the language of entrepreneurship.

Guidelines for university partnerships will be available in July 2018 with a call for applications to be formally launched in September at the UK’s national Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education Conference in Leeds.

The British Council strongly believes that this initiative will significantly support Georgia in developing a creative economy and the young generation to acquire new skills to become competitive for the labor market in country and globally.

By ADVERTORIAL