WELCOME

The reason why I create this additional blog is first and foremost the ambition to describe, to whom it may concern, the internship I will carry out the following seven-month period in Baku, Azerbaijan. During the introductory phase of the internship I have experienced some difficulties to gather and get hold of accurate information, on both historical and present Azeri events. Thus, the blog will also serve as an attempt to provide updated information on key Azeri occurrences. My aim is to contribute as much objectivity as possible to the updated events I will bring up. However, I am completely aware of the difficulty to fulfil this aim.

NB! I decided to end my internship on the 29th of October in order to write my bachelor thesis on International Aid versus Social Entrepreneurship and to carry out an internship for the Swedish based organization Social Entrepreneurship Forum (SE Forum) that promotes social entrepreneurship as a way of solving social and environmental problems while at the same time earning a profit. My overall impression of the internship was that - despite the organizational problems and sometimes deficient performance - it was very much fruitful and my experiences from the Republic of Azerbaijan invaluable. I will truly miss the people I got to know, the things I did and the daily life in this highly interesting country. As a promise to myself and to many people involved in this programme I will keep on updating the blog, both on everyday experiences (thesis and SE Forum internship) and on current Azeri events, until January 2010. The reason I decide to do it this way is that Azerbaijan is still present and my thesis would probably not be written in the same way if it wasn't because of the experiences I get from SE Forum and the ones I got from Azerbaijan.

YUVA HUMANITARIAN CENTER

From the 14th of june until the 15th of january of 2010 I will, together with another Swedish student, carry out an internship in Yuva Humanitarian Center financed by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). While being in Azerbaijan I will represent the Swedish NGO Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation that mainly works with women in conflict areas. Kvinna till Kvinna started to cooperate with Azeri NGO's in 2004 and one year later the cooperation also included YUVA. Until now, the activity of Kvinna till Kvinna in the caucasian area (Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia) is coordinated from Tbilisi, capital of Georgia.

Yuva Humanitarian Center (YUVA), with main office in Baku, was founded in 1997 by two Azerbaijani women and is a non-governmental and non-profit organization. In 1999 the organization was registered in the Ministry of Justice and works since then as an umbrella organization that encourages young Azeri women to take an active interest in shaping their own lives. By actively empowering women through group discussions, national seminars and educational programs in leadership and democracy, the long-term goal of YUVA is to improve the civil rights of the female population of Azerbaijan.

Mission: Participate in self-realization of women, children and youth in building a civil society in Azerbaijan and to assist them to realize natural human rights and main values of humanity.

Objective: Develop educational initiatives in the field of civil society, conflict resolution, human rights and peace-building, to promote intercultural relations in Azerbaijan society.

For any additional information to the website, for personal opinions or interest in collaboration do not hesitate to contact me, Kvinna till Kvinna or YUVA Humanitarian Center.

E-mail: Karin Larsson
E-mail: Kvinna till Kvinna
E-mail: YUVA Humanitarian Center

Azerbaijan: Geography

Azerbaijan belongs, together with Georgia and Armenia, to the South Caucasian region. The region is separated from the North Caucasus by the Caucasus Mountains at the northern border of Georgia. To the east, the country is bounded by the Caspian Sea and with neighbours such as Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Iran and Turkey, Azerbaijan is at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. Azerbaijan is considered as a part of Eurasia though in some occasions it may be mentioned as part of Asia. The capital of Azerbaijan is Baku (Baki) with a population of 2.1 million. The total azerbaijani population is about 8,7 million. (Detailed information on the internationally unrecognized region of Nagorno-Karabakh and the exclave of Nakhichevan will be provided when available.)

Beyond good intentions

I have now been working with the thesis for three weeks. The thought that only seven weeks of writing remain is very stressing since the work until now goes extremely slow. Only the task of defining 'social entrepreneurship' has been of great struggle and I am still working with this part. The next step will be to define international aid. Whether I will be able to write the whole thesis in a period of ten weeks I don't know, until now the biggest challenge has been to combine the writing with the job I do for SE Forum and UF Linköping. Although all the work tasks I am having at the moment are related to similar issues they all deserve their own specific attention - which requires many hours a week.

However, the best thing with doing many things at the same time is that the possibility of finding new and interesting things out there increases. When trying to give a fair description of what actually is social and entrepreneurial in 'social entrepreneurship' I found the video-based website Beyond Good Intentions. From different countries in the world BGI's offers ten film series with principal aim to investigate the effectiveness of international aid. Below you can see the 10th episode from South Africa investigating and giving examples of what they in this case choose to define as aid - namely social entrepreneurship. Although it's a quite simple description of the meaning of SE it makes it easier to understand what it's all about.


Furthermore, I have now started to create the project team that will be responsible for the carrying out of workshops at UFS's convention in March 2010. Check my latest blog entry for further information. There is still plenty of room for those of you who would like to be part of the team or simply give a helping hand!

Directly from Azerbaijan

I am listening to SR Kristianstad and in a few minutes my colleague that is still in Azerbaijan will be talking about the internship so far. For those of you that know Swedish and would like to get the latest news from Baku please listen here.