This month, work will begin on translating the EMCDDA’s European Prevention Curriculum (EUPC) into Georgian and adapting it to the Georgian context. The activity is being run under the EMCDDA4Georgia bilateral technical cooperation project (EMCDDA4GE), which aims to enhance national responses to drug-related health and security threats.
One of the key objectives of the EMCDDA4GE project is knowledge-transfer and capacity-building in the field of prevention. The EUPC translation and adaptation process will be coordinated by the Tomáš Zábranský Institute of Addiction Studies at the Ilia State University (Tbilisi), under the supervision of the EMCDDA.
Prevention plays a dominant role in national drug strategies. Georgia adopted in 2021 its first stand-alone National Strategy for the Prevention of Drug Abuse (2021–2026), designed to create an effective, coherent and well-coordinated mechanism to prevent substance use in the country.
The national prevention strategy, together with the EUPC in the Georgian language, will help strengthen the Georgian prevention system and disseminate and boost the application and uptake of effective prevention approaches. It will also facilitate well-informed choices about funding and implementation priorities at national, regional or local level.
The translation and adaptation project will be led by Professor Jana D. Javakhishvili, who drafted the National Strategy for the Prevention of Drug Abuse, and by Ms Mariam Razmadze, the first national EUPC trainer in Georgia.
The EUPC initiative, launched in 2019, aims to advance the professionalism of the substance use prevention workforce in Europe. It was designed to provide training to decision-, opinion-, and policy-makers about the most effective evidence-based prevention approaches and interventions. The curriculum, which applies a train-the-trainer approach, consists of the EUPC handbook and a variety of materials to support the training courses.
This webpage has been produced with the assistance of the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of the EMCDDA and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.
