UNDP has launched the new business grants contest for internally displaced people and local residents of Donetsk and Luhansk regions to support entrepreneurship and small businesses in Donbas. Application for grants is open to IDPs residing in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts as well as to local populations of these regions until 3 August 2017.

UNDP opens a bicycle path at Regional Landscape Park “Nizhynskiy”, encouraging Ukrainians to use bicycles in their daily life and taking care of the environment. The cycle path is ten and a half kilometers long route across different landscapes, including around five kilometers of dirt road and six kilometers of forestry road. The route is also equipped with informational boards, pointers and pavilions for rest during the trip along the road.

UNDP is launching a new project on improving energy efficiency of public buildings in Ukraine, such as hospitals, schools, governmental and higher education facilities, kindergartens, orphanages, pharmacies, employment centres, libraries and museums in small and medium sized cities. The project will enable municipalities to directly implement energy efficiency measures by providing technical support to Energy Service Companies.

The Center for Administrative Service Provision (TsNAP) in Druzhkivka, Donetsk Oblast, is fully operational now and will render 139 services to 120,000 people in and around the city. The TsNAP was fully equipped under the UNDP Recovery and Peacebuilding Programme and with funding from the European Union.

This water pump station in Semenivka was heavily shelled in 2014, leaving 5 million people in Donetsk region without water. Its restoration was a top priority for UNDP efforts on securing water supply for local enterprises and population. Now the pump station is fully operational again. The repair works were completed with financial support of the Government of Japan.

Are you part of a civil society organization based in Ukraine? Do you have an idea for a project that can improve dialogue between civil society organizations and government bodies? Do you think you can implement your project within a year and with a UNDP grant of no more than 30,000 USD?

Residents of Donetsk oblast can now obtain information regarding state-funded medicines available in all hospitals of the region through web-site http://eliky.in.ua/. Rivne, Odesa, Khmelnytsky and Zaporizhzhya regions and partly Chernivtsi, Chernihiv, Volyn, Zakarpattya, Luhansk, Ternopil regions and the city of Kyiv are currently connected to the platform.

Starting from June 2017, the State Employment Service of Ukraine is piloting new approaches to better integrate into the labour market people from vulnerable groups, following a methodology developed by UNDP. These pilots are now underway in seven out of the 27 regions of Ukraine. We can learn from the experience of other countries which already went through this transformation adopting concepts such as activation, client orientation, case-based profiling, and individual work plans development.

UN Development Programme in Ukraine (UNDP) is to hold a business event, East Expo 2017, involving the leading small and medium enterprises from Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. This two-day event will take place in Kyiv.

The United Nations Development Programme is procuring medicines not only for Ukraine, but now also for neighboring Moldova. Procurement through UNDP allowed a Ukrainian manufacturer to reach a new market.

The Black Sea has twice as much floating plastic as any other sea in Europe, according to an environmental survey funded by the European Union and UNDP. Mobile application deployed to help revive affected waters.