The most recent joint damage assessment by the government of Ukraine, the European Commission and the World Bank finds that physical damage caused by Russia during the first year of the war over $135 billion and the cost of reconstruction and recovery across Ukraine’s social, productive, and infrastructure sectors would be $411 billion, 2.6 times the country’s estimated 2022 GDP. So we need to make sure every hryvnia, dollar, euro, yen, and pound is well spent and that donor support is well coordinated and matched to the most pressing needs.

Rebuilding Ukraine better is a powerful act of resistance and defiance, as this WIRED article makes clear.

Given the depth and extent of Ukraine’s existing open government ecosystem, we can rethink the whole process flow of the reconstruction to be fast, efficient and open. We want to go beyond supporting a transparency portal to have a digital ecosystem that links damage assessment, budgets, project planning, procurement and delivery in an integrated way to support better coordination and delivery of projects in real-time.

DREAM: End-to-end transparency for the reconstruction

Knowing the huge challenges ahead to deliver on that vision, we are directly working with the Ministry of Communities, Territories and Infrastructure Development of Ukraine (Ministry for Restoration) to build on Ukraine’s world-class open data and open government infrastructure to deliver a system to support end-to-end transparency and accountability for the key projects that will underpin the reconstruction.

Step forward, DREAM: Ukraine’s Digital Reconstruction Ecosystem for Accountable Management that we are directly building in collaboration with the government and with RISE Ukraine. Our Head of Ukraine support is leading the DREAM project office under the Ministry. DREAM creates a single pipeline from communities to funders and helps to coordinate all stages of reconstruction project implementation.

DREAM was launched at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in London and the first 200 government users and 5000 projects are already in the system, covering 24 government departments and 190 Municipalities. We will be scaling the system during 2023.

“We follow the experience of implementing successful government digital solutions, such as Prozorro and Prozorro.Sale, when representatives of civil society with the support of international partners were engaged in the development of electronic systems at the request of government bodies. After the launch, the systems were transferred to the balance of the state in the form of a state-owned enterprise. At the same time, the state does not spend a single penny of budget funds on the creation of the system.”
Deputy Minister of Community Development, Territories and Infrastructure, Oleksandr Azarkhina.

Ukraine has always had a special place in our hearts. Supporting Ukraine’s award-winning Prozorro procurement reforms was one of our first big investments as OCP. After Russia’s brutal, unprovoked invasion, we are stepping up our support to help with the country’s recovery and reconstruction

Our amazing partners across government, business and civil society in Ukraine are amongst the most courageous and smartest champions for better government that we know. They’ve put good governance, openness and fair play at the core of their commitment to modernizing their country with transformational reforms in public procurement and other vital services that are an inspiration to governments everywhere. 

That is why we are honored to have helped bring together 40 Ukrainian and international civil society organizations to create the RISE Ukraine Coalition to set out an equally ambitious vision of a Recovery with Integrity, Sustainability and Efficiency.

We want to particularly thank both the BHP Foundation and the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office for their specific support both to RISE Ukraine and to OCP to help deliver DREAM. We need more donors to get on board, so please reach out to us here!

The Maidan revolution of 2014 set off a chain reaction in Ukraine that had a profound impact on the country’s public procurement. Civil society, private sector and government reformers transformed public procurement after many years of corruption and inefficiency. They enshrined open contracting and the Open Contracting Data Standard into law, paving the way to create systems that have increased competition, reduced the time and money spent on contracting processes, helped buyers make better decisions and made procurement fairer for suppliers.

While Ukraine’s open contracting reforms started with public procurement, they have evolved beyond it, influencing some of the most complex and opaque sectors in government including health and defense.

Read all about the impact of Ukraine’s open contracting reforms.