Introducing – New Co-director of WECF Georgia Office

September 27, 2022
|In Women's Power - Georgia, Key issues, Women's rights in Agenda2030, Energy Cooperatives, Gender equality, Programmes, International solidarity, Women's Major Group, WHRDs, Country, Type of resource, News, Women2030, Georgia
|By Kira van Middelaar

This September, Ida Bakhturidze joined the management team of our WECF Georgia office as Co-director alongside Anna Samwel.

Ida Bakhturidze is a human rights defender and an expert in the field of women’s empowerment, gender equality, and sustainable development, which are her passions in her professional as well as personal life.

Ida has been working with WECF Georgia (Caucasus) since 2015 as a full-time Country Coordinator and in 2022, she was appointed as a co-director. She has been actively engaged in developing the feminist movement in Georgia and in 2011 together with other activists created the Independent Group of Feminists (IGF)—the first activist group that openly declared to be feminist.

She is an opinion leader and managed to get the Georgian media interested in the feminist agenda. Ida is very often invited as a guest speaker on different TV or Radio stations. As a result, the feminist discourse became more vigorous and made many people reflect on the oppressing local cultural processes and practices in gender terms.

As a feminist activist, Ida Bakhturidze received the 2018 Kato Mikeladze award for the Women Human Rights Defenders, in recognition of my achievements in supporting women’s rights and gender equality. She is part of the multi-stakeholder independent feminist Task Force on Women’s Political Participation that consults government and parliament on adopting progress legislation on gender equality and the environment. She is also on the advisory board of the Women’s Fund in Georgia and former board chair of “Tbilisi Pride”, also, one of the founders of the platform “Women of Georgia”, which are at the forefront of current social change in Georgia. As co-director of WECF Georgia, Ida coordinates the Women Power program on social inclusion and sustainable development with youth, women, and disability organisations. She also works on the indoor air quality program for better environmental health in Kindergartens in Georgia and the promotion of renewable energy solutions in rural communities.

Now, Ida Bakhturidze and Anna Samwell have joint forces and will be heading the organisation together as co-directors.