Member of the CSDC team since 2022 and, since 2025, life skills trainer and psychologist-consultant in the Transit Programme. She has worked in child protection since 2006.
Manana Gabunia has been a member of the CSDC team since 2022. In 2022–2025 she was a social worker in the Transit Educational Programme for homeless children, and since 2025 she has worked in the same programme as a life skills trainer and psychologist-consultant. She began her career in child protection in 2006, first as a social worker in the state sub-programme for preventing abandonment and deinstitutionalizing homeless children and children without parental care, and then at the Social Service Agency.
She has extensive experience in vocational education and career planning. In 2022–2025 she coordinated the component for developing vocational education in public schools at the Skills Agency. Before that she worked in the Ministry of Education and Science’s Vocational Education Development Department, and she also coordinated career guidance and planning at the Mandatory Service. She worked as a monitoring and evaluation expert on UNDP projects, created a handbook and delivered trainings for SOS Children’s Villages Georgia, and developed a training-of-trainers module for the Georgian Adult Education Network. In 2017–2023 she was the executive director of the Centre for Social Development.
She holds a master’s degree in social work from Ilia State University and completed a one-year certificate programme in practical psychology and psychotherapy at the IDC Positive Psychotherapy Centre. She is currently studying on the Wiesbaden international diploma course in positive and transcultural psychological counselling, as well as art therapy.