The government of Georgia has launched a program which will ease the enrollment of students from the Abkhazia and Tskhinvali (South Ossetia) regions at Georgian universities, reports civil.ge.

As part of the new program, aspiring students from the occupied regions will go through a year-long preparations course for university admissions. They will study at Tbilisi State University and Zugdidi State University. The students need to pass two exams to be successfully enrolled, one in the Georgian language and the other in the subject they wish to study.

“The program is designed for residents of the occupied territories, to ease their access to education in subjects that they are not taught there, as well as to ease their enrollment at universities,” said Reconciliation Minister Ketevan Tsikhelashvili at a presentation on April 17 held at Tbilisi State University.

According to the Ministry of Reconciliation, the pilot project will run from mid-April through mid-July, and will be at full swing by September 2019. The Ministry specified that the program will be fully funded, and that participants will be provided with housing and a monthly stipend of GEL 150.

The first cohort of the students from the occupied regions comes from the Gali district in Abkhazia and the Akhalgori district in South Ossetia, which are predominantly populated by ethnic Georgians. In recent years, Georgian schools remaining in Gali and Akhalgori gradually started to teach their classes in the Russian language, a move that has angered the government authorities in Tbilisi.

The school preparation program is part of the “A Step for a better Future” initiative, which is a peace initiative launched by the Georgian government. The aim of the initiative is to launch legislative initiatives for enhancing economic and people-to-people exchanges between residents of the Abkhazia and Tskhinvali Region/South Ossetia and the rest of Georgia. The three main objectives of the initiative are: the facilitation of trade across the dividing lines; enhancement of educational opportunities in Georgia and abroad as well as simplifying the access to Georgia’s EU integration benefits.