DREAM: While fighting for its future, Ukraine invented a better way to make investments that benefit people and the planet
In the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a video went viral of an elderly Ukrainian woman confronting a Russian soldier. “Put these seeds in your pocket,” she insisted. “So at least sunflowers will grow when you all lie down here.”
The moment captured the grief and courage of the people of Ukraine, but also their defiant hope: Russia will be beaten, Ukraine will be restored.
The toll of the war, now in its fourth year, has been devastating. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed along with countless military casualties. More than eight million Ukrainians have fled the country and another eight million have been displaced internally. Direct damages are estimated at $176 billion, while the total cost of reconstruction is estimated at $524 billion, according to the latest Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment.
Yet amid the destruction, Ukrainians remain determined to rebuild their country. They want to turn Ukraine into a modern, democratic, sustainable, and inclusive nation. And they aren’t waiting for the bombs to stop falling to get started.
Damaged schools have already been renovated, equipped with bunkers and state-of-the-art classrooms. Hospitals are being expanded to provide world-class care for war veterans. Social housing is being built for those displaced by the fighting.
Managing these and thousands of other reconstruction projects is a daunting task. It must be fast, effective and trustworthy to ensure Ukraine’s rapid and effective recovery, even as conditions on the ground change constantly.
Ukraine has made this possible by digitalizing the entire process. Restoration and modernization projects can be managed and tracked in granular detail through a central, publicly available platform called DREAM, short for Digital Restoration Ecosystem for Accountable Management. The real-time system is designed to help the state allocate funding for public projects in a way that meets government priorities and the actual needs of Ukrainian citizens.
The platform was co-created by a coalition involving a large number of government and non-government organizations and is run by a team in Kyiv, building on 10 years of transparent and accountable govtech reforms in Ukraine since the Maidan revolution. Open Contracting Partnership (OCP) hosts the DREAM project office, led by Viktor Nestulia, OCP’s Head of Ukraine Support.
DREAM was announced at a gathering of Ukrainian leaders, international donors and businesses in 2023 at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in London. Two years later, this innovative system is being used by 1286 local governments (hromada) – equivalent to 87% of all local governments in Ukraine, all 18 Ministries and 24 regional administrations, and major state-owned enterprises such as Ukrainian Railways, Postal Service, Naftogaz, Ukrenergo, and the Agency for Restoration. As of 30 June, 2025, the system includes information on 12,596 projects with an estimated value of ₴1.77 trillion (US$42.5 billion), according to data from the platform’s business intelligence module. Currently 9% of these are fully funded and 18% partially funded.
Aligning the goals of government and investors with community needs
In a major departure from conventional central planning, DREAM supports local governments to propose their own priority projects. International partners and central government authorities can either choose existing DREAM projects that match their funding needs or they can run new selection processes. For example, the system has been used to choose projects for a $100 million program for school shelters and canteens. Through an open and efficient data-driven process, some 500 proposals were submitted and 228 projects were selected – what would have traditionally taken six months or more can now be done in a matter of weeks.
This process also set a new transparency standard since not only the selection but also the project implementation is available online. The platform has an interactive map that makes it easier for taxpayers to search for projects in their area.
Following the ‘everyone sees everything’ principle introduced with Ukraine’s e-procurement system ProZorro, DREAM aggregates data from nine other digital platforms and presents the information in an impressive array of user-friendly maps, charts, tables, and downloads, in Ukrainian and English. Each project has its own detailed profile, including data on funders, organizations involved and their roles, technical specifications, implementation status, and payments (for example, see the project profile for a new military hospital in Rivne region). The project profiles also link to other third-party platforms with more in-depth information about companies (such as YouControl and OpenDataBot) and citizen monitoring reports. Additional e-democracy tools are set to be integrated directly in the DREAM platform in the future.
Making public investment strategic and predictable
Early on, the DREAM team considered taking a public investment management approach, inspired by the IMF’s framework. As Viktor Nestulia points out, planning and delivering the reconstruction is very similar to wider public investment: “there is no big difference between building a new school or rebuilding a school that was damaged.”
They had discussions with people in government who were thinking about a long-term plan for Ukraine’s prosperity beyond the war restoration efforts. The country’s economy shrank by nearly a third in 2022, and while it has since stabilized, Ukrainians remain keenly aware of how critical it is to manage their existing resources effectively and attract additional international investment.
Research showed Ukraine had 15 different public investment mechanisms (see DREAM PIM Guide 2025 [in Ukrainian]). This complexity created challenges in ensuring funding was distributed efficiently and effectively to the most important projects, and delivered the most value for communities. So the government decided to streamline public investment into one unified and strategic system based on global best practices and adapted to the Ukrainian context.
When implementation of the public investment management reform began in 2024, it included plans to create a single IT system that would facilitate project planning, prioritization, and implementation. DREAM was chosen as the technical solution for the job.
The process: How a project gets earmarked for state funding
Under the leadership of the Ministry of Finance, the regulatory framework was developed alongside the technology at an unprecedented pace for public investment reform. Within three weeks, a functional pilot was created, through a collaborative process involving ministries, state and local authorities, and international experts.
The beta tool was used to gather 813 project proposals in just eight days, each of which was automatically given a priority score based on financial, social, environmental, and other standard criteria. Of those, 96 projects were earmarked for funding from the Ukrainian government and loans of international financial institutions.
“The pilot proved the technology works, and the process works, and we identified what needs fine tuning,” says Nestulia.
The model is being refined in 2025 to digitize more of the public investment management process and integrate local needs into the decision-making process. It is based on the UK’s Five Case Model for developing projects and programs, as well as recommendations from the European Investment Bank’s JASPERS program, European Commission, and World Bank. It was co-created by the Government of Ukraine (under the leadership of the Ministry of Finance), with the help of the Open Contracting Partnership, the DREAM Project Office, and Ukrainian and international experts and civil society organizations (such as Alinea International and their project Reform for All, Green Transition Office and Dixi Group).
«We’re moving beyond the idea that DREAM is just about recovery,” says Inna Stets, Chief Operating Officer of the DREAM Project Office. “Public investments are, first and foremost, about strategic planning. Our task is to fully integrate the reform into a transparent, digital, and accessible system — so that every citizen can understand and trust it. To do that, we need integration with all key systems — and we’re already on that path.»
Empowering public servants to secure investments
But technology is only as good as the skills of the people who use it. An advantage of digitalizing the public investment management process is that the rules can be built into the user flow of the tool. Instead of needing to manually ensure compliance with requirements set out in guidance documents that are hundreds of pages long, the logic of the process can be built into the design of the DREAM system. Users automatically follow the correct procedures without giving it any thought.
“We are reimagining the process for project preparation, going from lengthy feasibility studies to the actual, transactional data that is needed to make an investment decision,” says Nestulia.
This is crucial in a context where overburdened public servants in towns under attack may not have the resources or experience to meet demanding reporting requirements. Data on project preparation enables the DREAM team to see bottlenecks where applications might be getting stuck or where local authorities need additional support and to proactively assist them.
To support onboarding and user service, the DREAM team integrated a chatbot and customer relationship management system and established a network of 16 regional account managers who coordinate thousands of monthly requests from local governments. Every local government client has a dedicated contact point and service agreements with response and resolution metrics. DREAM has delivered 81 training sessions for more than 9,000 clients in most regions. To respond to the high demand for capacity building, the team is improving the DREAM learning management system and developing online courses on public investment management. Some 88 percent of DREAM users recommend working with the platform and its team in a recent survey.
In Kyiv, a city under constant attack, life goes on but there’s always a shared awareness of what’s at stake, explains Tetiana Yashchuk, the DREAM Project Office’s Communications Manager.
“People work, walk, go out for coffee (…) Air alerts are a part of daily life (…) Some months, you might spend half your nights in a shelter, a garage, or in your bathroom. It may start to feel routine, but you never truly get used to it. It’s like a lottery. You know anything can happen to you. Life. Resilience. That’s what gets you up and moving each day. Everyone on the team knows that what we do has real impact. It’s about helping communities, regions — the whole country — build their capacity to rebuild better and develop strategically.»
By 2026, DREAM will become the legally mandated platform for managing all public investment projects in Ukraine at the central, regional and local government level. So far over 1500 people from eight regions have taken part in the ongoing capacity building campaign to prepare local and regional authorities for the reform, with more sessions planned for the rest of the country in the coming months.
With its bottom-up, open and strategic approach to wartime reconstruction and modernization, Ukraine is sowing the seeds now for a better future, and showing the rest of the world a better way to make the right investments in the right place, for the right reasons, for the benefit of people and the planet.
DREAM is being implemented with the generous support of the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) and the UK Embassy in Ukraine, as well as BHP Foundation and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) . Thanks go to USAID for its past support too.
