Assessing Youth Drug Use in Tajikistan: Technical Planning meeting
Dushanbe, Tajikistan - 1 st March 2016
Sub-Programme 4 "Trends and Impacts" of UNODC's Regional Programme for Afghanistan and Neighbouring Countries held a Technical Planning meeting with national focal points to inform development and roll-out of a national youth drug use survey in Tajikistan.
It is part of a major undertaking by Sub-Programm 4 and the Survey and Statistics Section of UNODC HQ in Vienna to support surveys of drug use by youths in Member States in West and Central Asia and comes on the back of similar planning meetings with Afghan counterparts to inform pilot surveys in Afghanistan.
The Technical Planning meeting took place at the offices of the Drug Control Agency under the President of Tajikistan with attendance by representatives from Ministries of Education, Health and Social Protection, Agency for Statistics under the President of the Republic of Tajikistan and Committee for Youth, Sports and Tourism under the Government of the Republic of Tajikistan.
Mr. Senyo Agbohlah, Programme Coordinator of Sub-Programme 4 chaired the meeting which resulted in substantial progress being made to finalize questionnaires for the in school surveys, agreement on roles and responsibilities, the timeline for project implementation and concrete next steps.
The Youth Drug Use Surveys project is designed to not only allow for the first ever trend analysis on youth drug use in the region to inform development of policy interventions and responses but also increase national capacities to design and implement such surveys - on both pilot and national basis. It is planned that data collection will commence later on in the year following necessary, substantial planning. This will be followed by data collation, cleaning, analysis and report writing to take place in the summer.
Similar technical meetings and planning sessions will take place in Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Iran, and Uzbekistan in the coming months to inform country-specific reports which then form the basis of a regional report.
The RP is thankful for the generous support of the European Union, and Governments of Denmark and Italy, without which the pilot youth drug use survey project would not be possible.