Dear Deputy Minister Barkalaia,

As a follow-up to our discussion today please see the information below:

1. I have attached the email we have sent to the Ministers assistant regarding our meeting request.

2. With regards to the PGA, we respect your decision to wait until the restructuring is completed however after discussing with the team I was informed of the following:

• The desk review and the interviews for the PGA have already been completed with is the majority of the data collection part.
• There should be a participatory workshop which is in essence a focus group discussion with some members of the ministry to confirm the information is correct. We can do this with just a half day meeting in Tbilisi with about 10 people from the relevant departments.
• At this point we cannot ‘switch’ the PGA target departments as the data collection and most of the analysis has already been done.
• If we wait until after the restructuring to hold the participatory workshop it would be very difficult to conclude the process and we risk having to abandon all the work we have done and to restart the process.

We would therefore like to request that we do this half-day meeting (as soon as possible) and conclude this process with a draft report before the end of 2019. If, after the restructuring is completed, the Ministry would like to conduct PGAs in any of the LEPLs or other departments, we could explore supporting a new PGA.  

3. UN Women has partnered with ISET to conduct RIAs on the prospects of ratification of the three ILO conventions: C 183 (Maternity Protection), C 189 (Domestic Workers), and C 156 (Workers with Family Responsibilities):

• ISET is working to develop the detailed outline and the work plan of the RIAs (ideally this will include an indicative list of the legislations that would be affected to align to the conventions)
• We would like to propose the first discussion with the working group of the tripartite commission between Dec 2 – Dec 20 2019. The discussion would be to validate the outline and to prioritize which of the areas the RIA should focus on.
• We can organize this meeting in January 2020, however, since it is in the tripartite commission working group’s work plan to hold the discussion in 2019, we would like to offer our support to accomplish this.