Georgia’s “300 Lari” public employment program for socially vulnerable citizens is quietly reaching its end. The note for the 2026 state budget project explained the decision to axe it as driven by “high economic growth” and parallel “labor shortages.” The government plans to shift focus to “various retraining programs” to boost access to the private job market.
Introduced in 2022 under then-Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili, the scheme employed around 40,000 people at its peak and spent over USD 100 mln from the budget. It was sold as a labour activation tool, meant to build work habits and nudge people toward the private sector.
But in practice, it fit neatly into the political economy of locked-in Georgia, where the state, and the party that controls it, still acts as the leading employer of last resort.
Anna Kvernadze is a public policy consultant with extensive experience in governance and reform.
“Our citizens need to get used to work,” Garibashvili said late in 2021 as he announced the program. He argued that the country’s social policy “accustomed adult labor force, our citizens, to unemployment, poverty, and inaction.”
His words were followed by a more detailed “public works” approach that conditioned the retention of social assistance on a willingness to seek employment. Noting that roughly one-third of the 600,000 assistance-dependent citizens at the time constituted the unemployed workforce, Garibashvili offered them four options: a GEL 300/month (USD 110) public job, a private vacancy, a professional training or retraining program, or the formalization of the informal work they were already doing.
Families of those who’d take part in the program would retain their social benefits for another four years. Those unwilling would have their status reviewed after one year.
Whether the “public work” positions – sweeping cemeteries, tending village gardens, or tidying up bus stops – ever amounted to real jobs is less clear. In region after region, schedules were loose, and supervision was light. Yet for many of its beneficiaries, especially outside the big cities, the program was what showed up in the envelope, not what was written in the decree. Those 300 GEL a month came on top of Targeted Social Assistance (TCA) and often decided whether a family could pay bills on time or sink deeper into informal, unstable side jobs.
Four years on, the program is ending, its architect is standing trial on corruption charges, and no research data is available on whether the policy succeeded in its main purpose: “accustoming” Georgians to work. Garibashvili’s successors, however, have offered parallel explanations about why so many families still seek social assistance.
Ever-Stretching Social Assistance Database
Speaking before parliament on November 26, Georgian Dream Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze argued that the number of people receiving social assistance needs to be revised. He pointed to economic growth and “halving” of poverty in recent years, and claimed that more citizens currently receive social benefits than fall under the poverty line. He attributed the continued growth in beneficiary numbers to a pandemic-era “moratorium” on eligibility reviews. The increase in the number of those relying on assistance “had no connection with the worsening of people’s social conditions,” he said.
The steadily growing proportion of Georgians reliant on social assistance has indeed long drawn concerns.
The country runs a wide array of social programs, two of which stand out for their scale and impact: Targeted Social Assistance (TSA) scheme, which provides monthly cash support to the poorest households based on a detailed welfare score, and a broad set of social packages for specific vulnerable groups – people with disabilities, veterans, orphans, and others, covering essential needs such as utilities, transportation, medication and housing.
The number of Georgians benefiting from TSA rose from 432,487 in 2014 to more than 700,000 by 2025. The numbers appear even more worrying when looking at the total number of families registered as seeking social benefits. In 2018, the TSA database listed 946,297 individuals, nearly half of whom received state support. By 2024, the number of registered individuals had climbed to 1,272,572, a 34.5 % increase.
More than one-third of the population is now included in the TSA registry, an extraordinary share for a country that simultaneously reports falling unemployment and a poverty rate being cut in half. Can the crisis-era moratorium alone explain this troubling trend?
Better Stats, Same Structure
Looking at parallel stats, Georgia’s labour market undoubtedly looks better on paper. Between 2021 and 2024, the labour force increased from 1.53 million to 1.63 million, employment climbed from 1.22 million to 1.40 million, and the number of unemployed dropped from 316,200 to 227,000. This reduced the official unemployment rate from 20.6% percent to 13.9%.
However, between 2014 and 2023, much of the drop in unemployment was carried not by a dynamic private sector, but by a 24 percent expansion of public jobs. In 2024, the share of informal non-agricultural work also began to creep up again, from 27.6% to 29.1%, a reminder that a growing share of “new” employment still comes without contracts, protections, or predictable pay.
The employment trends also show a sharp regional divide. If Samtskhe-Javakheti and Kakheti sit on the favourable side of that divide, with relatively low jobless rates helped along by seasonal agriculture, tourism, and cross-border trade, Imereti, Kvemo Kartli, and Guria tell the opposite story. Here, years of thin private investment, a lack of new sectors, and a heavy dependence on public jobs mean that formal work is scarce and young people have few places to go. The result is a labour market that survives on state money and short-term fixes.
Polls also reflect persistent financial anxiety. In 2024, Georgians continued to cite unemployment as the country’s top problem (26%), followed by poverty (13%) and political instability (10%).
All the above suggest an economy that looks transformed from a distance but feels much the same up close.
Jobs are being created, but often in places, sectors, or conditions that large parts of the population cannot reach. Growth filters through unevenly, pooling in a few centres while regions shaped by informality and weak private investment watch it pass by. Improving statistics can easily obscure the reality that much of the workforce remains trapped in low-wage, irregular jobs, while entire regions rely on the state to keep the money flowing.
Why end it now?
By 2024, roughly one-third of TSA beneficiaries, around 223,000 people, had at least one family member in a public employment program. This provided a modest but critical boost to socially vulnerable households and allowed them to retain their assistance for an additional 4 years.
On a broader scale, however, Georgia’s public employment program was never a serious route out of poverty. It looked far more like a political instrument to keep tens of thousands of vulnerable people formally attached to the state in places where real jobs were scarce.
And yet, if it helped Georgian Dream’s grip in the regions so much, the obvious question is: why give it up now?
The official answer would be that Georgia no longer needs it because the country has grown richer, labor market demand has increased, and poverty has been “halved.” A less polished explanation is already being whispered in local government corridors. Budgets are tight, municipalities are overstretched, and the money that once paid for 40,000 nominal jobs is harder to find.
The program did not end because its logic suddenly changed, but because its cost-benefit calculation for the state likely did.