Ukraine will receive EUR 1,200,000 in aid from the Government of the Czech Republic for the modernization of the educational system. The relevant Memorandum between the Ministry of Education and Culture of Ukraine and the Czech Development Agency was signed by the Minister of Education and Science Liliya Hrynevych and the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Czech Republic to Ukraine Radek Matula.
Funds will be provided in equal parts - 400,000 euros each - over 3 years (2019-2021) and will be distributed among 3 main directions:
- Technical support to the authorities of Ukraine in the reform of the educational system
– Inter-university cooperation
- Assistance to educational institutions that have internally displaced students and teachers
Within the first direction, it is planned to provide technical assistance to the Ministry of Education and Culture and other institutions - the Institute of Educational Analytics, the State Service for the Quality of Education, NAZYAVO and/or the Institute for the Modernization of Education Content. As a result, relevant specialists should acquire knowledge that will help implement educational reforms, in particular, taking into account the best practices of the EU.
The second component involves inter-university cooperation between Czech and Ukrainian universities. First of all, regional higher education institutions and institutions directly affected by the conflict in Eastern Ukraine and the occupation of Crimea will be included in it. Thanks to this, Ukrainian universities should create and/or improve their systems of internal quality assurance of education in accordance with the Standards and recommendations of the European Higher Education Area (ESG).
The goal of the third direction is to improve the quality of educational services in displaced higher education institutions and to include internally displaced persons in the educational process. For this, material, technical and expert support will be provided. In particular, the emphasis will be on the development of the necessary infrastructure.
Part of these components will be a continuation of the assistance that the Government of the Czech Republic provided to Ukraine in 2015-2018. Its total budget was 1.5 million euros. Cooperation was aimed at increasing institutional capacity in the field of education and providing technical assistance to displaced educational institutions and objects of educational infrastructure.
"We are very grateful to our Czech partners for the support they provide to Ukraine. All these areas - internal systems for ensuring the quality of higher education, assistance to displaced institutions, their teachers and students - are extremely important today. We hope that the new stage will be as fruitful and effective as the previous one. Within its limits, we were able to implement 8 projects, thanks to which, for example, displaced institutions received new equipment, premises were renovated. Our specialists also gained important experience in education standards and quality, implementation of inclusion, preparation for the PISA study, creation of educational analytics, etc. Projects of cooperation between regional universities to improve their management capacity, international mobility and academic independence have become no less important," noted the Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine, Liliya Hrynevych.
The Ambassador of the Czech Republic to Ukraine, Radek Matula, emphasized that in 2019, Ukraine became an integral part of the overall Czech cooperation in the field of development as a country of special attention.
"I think that this step serves as a confirmation of the development of our cooperation," he noted.
