The armed conflict in eastern Ukraine has led to staggering unemployment. Out of 23 major enterprises in Luhansk Oblast, 19 are currently not operating, while half of the enterprises in Donetsk Oblast are experiencing job cuts and partial employment resulting in a total loss of jobs of about 950,000.
Supporting employment is challenging in the best of circumstances, and far more so in situations of on-going conflict. Our UNDP Recovery and Peacebuilding Programme has one ambitious goal: to promote entrepreneurship in Donbas, inspire people who worked all their life in mines and factories to march on the unknown path of entrepreneurship and to believe in oneself and one’s country again.
That said, it is not so easy to convince people of the benefits of entrepreneurship. That is why UNDP started first by inspiring through the stories of ordinary people who, despite all the difficulties, have succeeded. We partnered with the Molodiya Social Advertisement Festival to broadcast the stories of people affected by conflict, who had opened or re-opened their businesses with our support. One of these is 71-year-old Pavlo, the blacksmith who moved from Luhansk to open his own smith workshop in the Kharkiv region. “Humans are made to work and in work one finds joy,” Pavlo says. Do you agree with him?
People like Pavlo needs funding to start their businesses, but UNDP grants cannot be available forever. Therefore, UNDP’s goal was not only to “feed”, but also “to teach how to fish.”After exploring several innovative financing instruments, we identified crowdfunding as the way forward.
Crowdfunding allows a supporter or backer to give funding directly to the beneficiary entrepreneur without working through an agency or a fund. This system enhances trust and transparency and creates a personal link between a supporter and an entrepreneur. For the entrepreneur it is a great way to showcase the product, strengthen their marketing and build a community of supporters around their business.
UNDP has now selected 15 businesses run by internally displaced people for the first Crowdfunding Academy in Ukraine. During two weekends in February, the business teams came to Kyiv to work on their idea, create a narrative for the promotional video and develop all the elements of a campaign, including perks and social media plans. The entrepreneurs were guided by a group of experts from the Croatian Crowdfunding Academy, UNDP’s Alternative Finance Lab and the Ukrainian crowdfunding website “Spilnokosht”.
Participants have worked hard on their campaigns and are now ready to receive funding support from the public, in Ukraine and abroad. Their businesses ideas range from designing a unique highly-durable Ukraine-made electric bike, to creating fashion patches for clothing; from developing individual quests for travelers to challenge each other, to educational games with scientific experiments for kids. Take for example the story of Oleksandr Dovzenko and his son who moved from Donbas to Reshetylivka in the Poltava region. Passionate about the preservation of Ukrainian traditional arts, Olexander wants to revive the famous art of making Reshetylivka carpets, once know across the Soviet Union, even to the point that one of them hangs in the United Nations headquarters in New York. On Indiegogo, Oleksandr will promote this forgotten art and look for funds to build an educational centre for carpet artists.
For us in the UNDP team, it has been an exciting journey, where we witnessed tremendous amounts of resilience, enthusiasm and learning. Crowdfunding is inspiring people to work hard and create new realities for their communities and the whole country, without depending too much on external support. Now it’s the turn of all Ukrainians and Ukraine-lovers around the world to witness the energy coming from these entrepreneurs, to support their ideas and to finance their businesses.
