Project Updates

Russian physician Nikolay Matveev’s experience at Harvard University, as part of the  Edmund S. Muskie Graduate Fellowship Program (Muskie), has enabled him to make powerful professional impact since returning to Moscow. Through his work at the Moscow Research Institute for Pediatrics and Children’s Surgery he has innovated the use of telemedicine in treating children in the far regions of Russia.

Increasing the preparedness of Ukrainian law students to enter the country’s legal system is a cornerstone of the Students’ League of the Ukrainian Bar Association (UBA) at the Economics and Law Faculty at Donetsk National University in Ukraine. The Students’ League has initiated projects to allow law students from all over Ukraine to network among their future legal peers, share knowledge, and develop their professional capacity. Targeted for reform by authorities, the Ukrainian legal system will benefit from an influx of trained and highly competent new lawyers.

Within six months of completing an intensive, in-service teacher training program in the United States, Indonesian English Teacher Yuna Kadarisman set out to share her experience and new teaching methodologies with hundreds of her peers in the South Sulawesi province of Indonesia, an area with limited professional development opportunities and resources for teachers.

In Windmill Park in the foothills of Northern Arizona, 19-year-old Anna Zinenko is investigating the potential market and benefits for wind energy. She hopes the efforts undertaken on these wind farms will produce transferrable results that can be utilized in her home country of Ukraine. Though only an undergraduate student, she is considered a peer among the researchers and professors from Northern Arizona University’s Sustainable Energy Solutions (SES).

When Kazakh graduate student Elmira Zhekeyeva received her Muskie fellowship to study at the University of Mississippi, she wanted not just to get her master’s in education, but to place an emphasis on special education. Her experience as a student and as an intern at the Special Olympics has given her fresh ideas and already helped her assist with relevant initiatives back in Kazakhstan.

Educational Fellowships in the United States provide opportunities for advancement at multiple levels of career studies. A recent example is that of two Moldovan fellows, graduate student Nadine Gogu and undergraduate student Mariana Oprea, who both pursued journalism at different stages of their lives and for different reasons, but both gaining valuable experience that would help them upon their return home.

 UNICEF recently selected the Girls World Communication Center (GWCC), an IREX partner, as its contractor to produce a national Newsletter on Girls Education in Yemen. The award came after UNICEF’s decision to extend the 2007 Newsletter program, highlighting GWCC’s high esteem as a women’s rights organization and effective program implementer.

Blogging and other participatory new media techniques and their connection with production of local news content were the focus of a recent three-day training course for Egyptian journalists run by Cairo University and jointly supported by two USAID-funded IREX projects in Egypt, the Media Development Program (MDP) and the Partnership Program for Democracy and Governance (PPDG).

This spring, IREX Global Libraries - Ukraine staff and the Ukrainian Library Association (ULA) hosted a workshop in Kyiv to kick off a large-scale needs assessment of public libraries. This assessment is part of the planning phase of the Global Libraries program, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

This spring, the USAID-supported Assistance to Russian Orphans (ARO) program, administered by IREX, sent a group of six Russian child-welfare professionals to the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) in New York City to observe US models and share lessons learned in family-based (foster) care for orphans, as well as to forge new working relationships.