Oil and gas fuels Azerbaijan's economy and keeps the overall unemployment rate low compared to many of its neighbors. However, finding meaningful employment remains more difficult in the regions of Azerbaijan, particularly for women. Sheki, a city of 63,000 two hundred miles north of Baku in the Caucasus mountains, hosts one of IREX’s f.y.i. Community Information Centers that provides provides local residents with IT skills, citizen journalism training, and access to the Internet. Seven young women who took advantage of the center’s trainings this past autumn used the skills they developed to land jobs.
Vusala Bayramova, 25, from the village of Gyrkh Balakh, started her career as a journalist last month. Formerly unemployed, Vusala is now a reporter for the local Region Sheki weekly newspaper and a freelance writer for the www.var.az [8], a private Baku-based online news resource. Vusala has been an active visitor of the f.y.i. center in Sheki and participated in almost all IREX training sessions on basic IT skills and professional and citizen journalism this year. “Indeed, my career began after I wrote an article called “New Media” about the training I participated in early November at the f.y.i. center. I offered the article to Region Sheki newspaper. They liked it, published it and then asked me to work for them,” recounts Vusala.
Eighteen year old Zohra Alizade, another alumni of IT skills training in the Sheki center, started work in a photo studio working on photo design and processing. “I am really happy…I am working now and I like my job. This would have not been possible without the training I participated in,” Zohra said.
Arzu Huseynova, coordinator of the FYI center in Sheki, believes his main mission at the center is to teach ICT skills and new media technologies to young people, especially from poor families in remote villages and suburbs of Sheki region. “No doubt that it will help them to have better future in Azerbaijan,” Huseynova says of trainings such as the course, “New Media Technologies,” which the center offers.
Internet use is rapidly growing in Azerbaijan, especially among younger generations who use the web for educational purposes and social networking. According to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the number of Internet users in Azerbaijan reached 3,689,000 people by August 2010 - 44.4% of the country’s population. In addition, with the struggles facing independent media, the Internet has become an important source of news for many people in Azerbaijan.
The Azerbaijan New Media Project [9], implemented by IREX with funding by USAID [10], includes a focus on increasing the use of Internet and new media technologies in Azerbaijan’s provinces. Along with the f.y.i. center in Sheki, IREX has opened centers in ten other regions – Sumgayit, Guba, Shirvan, Imishli, Ganja, Ismayilli, Gazakh, Lankaran, Mingachevir, and Zagatala. The centers work in close cooperation with local partner organizations such as public libraries, NGOs and educational organizations. Each center provides local citizens with access to computers and high-speed internet, while also providing training in computer literacy and new media technologies to young people. As part of the effort to boost community development, they host NGO meetings and other community events. IREX plans to expand the network of FYI centers further and to launch up to eight new centers outside Baku.