Regions

Chechen Republic

Chechen Republic just recovering from the 15 year war at their territory is experiencing tremendous deficit of both skilled specialists and elementary material supply to organise necessary work with youth. Social and economic situation in the region is such, that majority of the population lives below the poverty line. In some areas of Chechnya unemployment rates reach 75%, creating a favourable environment for the growth of crime, alcoholism and drug abuse especially among young people. Development of the civil society in the region falls behind the rest of Russia by about ten years. Because of years of conflict and instability in the region local civil society was cut out from the rest of Russia, where a number of projects, aimed at building civil society sponsored by USAID, European Union and other international donors were implemented. There is a number of strong Russian and international NGOs, including FOCUS-MEDIA Foundation and Caritas France, that have been operating quite successfully in the region for several years already, training local NGOs and helping them to build their capacity, yet there are still very few local civil society organisations; most local groups are weak, they lack trained personnel and have very little opportunity for professional growth. However the time is ripe to intervene with such a project now because the region is very quickly restored and its population starts to realise the very acute need of protecting the children and youth from the numerous challenges to their health.

Komi Republic

During the survey many respondents called the Republic of Komi  a typical "depressive" region, where the young people had no choice but to spend their free time going to disco or drink ing alcohol outdoors.
Deterioration of youth health mounted to the great scale, many of young people leave the region after they graduate from an education institution for more ‘progressive’ cities. Due to its distant location and depressed economic situation population is struggling for survival not putting much attention to their youth. At the same time, as FOCUS-MEDIA had worked in the region three years ago and maintain close contacts with the local partner organisations, local civil society organisations and regional government are eager to develop youth healthy life style programmes and are looking for support from outside to establish their own system of involving youth into voluntary actions

Lipetsk

On the contrary, Lipetsk oblast is much more advanced in terms of organising preventive events for and systematic healthy life style work with youth. Both NGOs and governmental entities are quite strong and well developed in terms of project management, peer education and health preserving activities. Though organisations there are also lacking methods and skills necessary to make their work really effective the regional GOs and NGOs if trained and having systematized their experience can be used as a training ground for others.