Georgia, One Year Later: Where Has the Aid Money Gone?

Tamuna Karosanidze is the executive director at Transparency International Georgia (TI Georgia).  She graduated from the Georgian Technical University in 2001 with a degree in Public Administration.  Karosanidze has been working for TI Georgia since February 2004.  Before that, she worked as the Civic Program Coordinator for the National Democratic Institute Georgia office for four years.  She also worked as a journalist for two national newspapers: Dilis Gazeti and Sakartvelos Gazeti.

Saumya Mitra a freelance economic development consultant working for the World Bank.  He led the multidonor coordinated Georgia: Joint Needs Assessment exercise immediately following the August 2008 conflict, with other participating institutions including United Nations agencies, the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the European Commision, the European Investment Bank, and the Internation Finance Corporation.

This report was used as the basis for donor decisions on support to Georgia. He has extensive experience working on macroeconomic and structural reforms in the South Caucasus and the Central Asian countries, and earlier led the World Bank's economic and reconstruction work in a number of post-conflict areas, notably Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Iraq.

Anthony Richter is the associate director of the Open Society Institute, and director of the OSI Central Eurasia Project and Middle East & North Africa Initiative.

Richter is chairman of the governing board of the Revenue Watch Institute and serves on the board of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the World Policy Journal, and other publications. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  He received a BA, with high honors, from Wesleyan University and an MA in Slavic languages and literatures from Columbia University. He speaks Russian, French, and Persian.