LEAD Commonwealth of Independent States

Read highlights of LEAD CIS 2006 activities

LEAD CIS was one of the seven programmes initially set up by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1991 and we recruited our first Cohort in 1992, the year of the Rio Earth Summit. The Programme runs in 12 countries in the Former Soviet Union: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

We have a regional network of 157 LEAD Fellows and Associates. We have many Fellows in positions of great influence in various sectors in all regions of the CIS countries.

Some LEAD CIS senior Fellows

Arcadie Capcelea is a leading specialist in the Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development Unit for Europe and Central Asia Region at the World Bank. He was the World Bank coordinator for the activities related to Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development. Dr. Capcelea was formally the Minister of Environment of the Republic of Moldova (1998-1999), Minister of Environment and Territorial Development (1999-2000).

Michael Kozeltsev is an Executive Director of the Russian Regional Environmental Centre (RREC), which aims to facilitate cross-sectoral cooperation for environmental improvement. He also leads the Centre on environmental economics at the Higher School of Economics. He is currently working on a new handbook on environmental economics under TACIS project focusing on economies in transition. He is also a coordinator in an OECD EAP Task Force project on economic instruments in environmental regulation. Dr. Kozeltsev is a Fellow at the Moscow State University.

Sanavbar Charipova has been Executive Director of the National Association of Business women of Tajikistan, since 1995. A graduate of Moscow Humanitarian University Cranfield University in the UK, she focuses her work on the economic empowerment of women and coordinates a micro-credit programme in Tajikistan. She participated in the "Beijing plus Five Review", an important international process allowing all the countries to negotiate a Common Approach to Gender Issues. In this regard she participated in the UN Commission on the Status of Women (2000) and Preparatory Committee for Beijing Plus Five.

Victoria Elias is Chair of the Coordination Board of the Pan-European ECO-Forum - the Environmental NGO Coalition of the UN-ECE region and Deputy Director of the Center for Environment and Sustainable Development "Eco-Accord". She is also a representative in the UN-CSD NGO Steering Committee and Management Committee for Eastern Europe and the Newly Independent States (NIS), and serves on boards of several international NGO' and multi-stakeholder networks.

LEAD CIS Partner Organisations

• Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences
• Institute of High Temperature, Russian Academy of Sciences
• Member of Academy of Education of Russian Federation
• University of Peoples Friendship
• Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment
• Orthodox Church University
• Moscow State University
• University of Budget and Tax Services
• Institute of Philosophy
• International Institute of Forests
• Institute of Russian Association of Industrialists and Entrepreneurship Economics
• Institute of History of Sciences
• Ministry of the Press, Russian Federation
• University of Economics
• Department of Strategic Planning of the Ministry of Energy of Russian Federation
• Institute of System Analysis
• Institute of Socio-Economic Issues of Population, Russian Academy of Sciences
• Russian Academy of International Trade Society
• Mendeleev Chemical Technology University
• Consultant to International Committee of Russian Parliament
• World Bank Program in Russia
• Institute of Economy Prognostics
• Russian Parliament's Committee on Ecology

Our most pressing concerns in this region are environmental education, desertification, sustainable economic development, and we are working hard with our network to help bring the lasting change needed.

Some of the projects LEAD CIS has been working on the last months

• report for UNHCR on environmental migration in the CIS;
• report for UNEP on desertification and drought-caused migration;
• a project with UNEP/Habitat on measuring sustainable development indicators in developing cities;
• UK-Russia Workshop of Young Scientists on Climate Change, organised together with the British Council and LEAD International;
• Training courses on teaching skills enhancing in collaboration with Russian-German consortium on landscape planning;
• Teachers’ guide “Geographical Perspectives on Sustainable Development”; based on experiences of geography teachers from developing and transitional economy countries.