USAID HOVERLA: Engaging young people in local governance in 25 Ukrainian communities

Our client was the USAID HOVERLA Activity, which supports Ukraine’s local self-government reform. Vplyvovi (“The Impactful”) was commissioned with the goal of increasing citizen participation in local government. Within that broader goal, its specific focus is on youth: getting young people involved in decision-making at the community level.

The full-scale invasion in 2022 mobilised Ukrainian society, and young people in particular moved into volunteering and solving problems where they lived. But local youth teams had no systematic grounding in how to design and run a project, and no sense of how to build a working dialogue with their local council. Ideas stayed ideas.

Key challenges:

• Without project-development skills, initiatives never reached the stage of a proposal a council or donor could fund
• Councils treated youth as an audience for events rather than as authors of proposals, and there was no shared language for negotiating priorities
• Delivery across 25 communities in 12 regions had to run remotely, in wartime, including frontline and border areas
• Whatever was built for 25 communities had to be reusable nationally, or the effect would end with the grant

1. Phase I: Selection and diagnosis. 90 communities applied; 25 were selected competitively – five more than planned. Of 362 registered applicants, around 200 young people stayed active throughout. For each community we prepared an analytical note on local problems, built from youth surveys and responses from officials, so later discussions started from evidence rather than opinion.
2. Phase II: Training and structured dialogue. We built an eight-module video course of 56 lessons, delivered through a Telegram bot to keep access low-barrier, and trained 10 mentors who worked with the teams throughout. In each community we ran a round table putting youth and officials at the same table – 309 participants, 94 of them local government representatives.
3. Phase III: Projects and national handover. 35 teams developed proposals across seven areas and pitched them at the Forum of Regional Change Leaders to a jury of 16 donor representatives. We then rebuilt the course as a 13-episode series and published it on Diia.Osvita, Ukraine’s national e-learning platform, in Ukrainian and English with a certificate.

Every target was exceeded: 25 communities against 20 planned, 35 team projects against 15–20, 240 Forum participants against 200, and 164 course graduates – 82% of active participants against an 80% target. Some teams had already secured mini-grants before the Forum took place.

The institutional shift mattered more than the counts. Councils backed youth projects with premises, land and funding; in several communities an official joined the team outright.

Teams consolidated into youth councils, and some registered their own NGOs to keep the work going. The team from Korosten went on to win a UNICEF selection – because they arrived with completed research and a specific proposal rather than an idea.

Ten of the 25 communities sat outside HOVERLA’s partner network, so the approach reached councils the programme did not otherwise work with. And the course outlived the grant: it is now a free public asset on Diia.Osvita, taken by over a thousand people by the end of 2024.

• Train before you convene. The round tables were designed as the first touchpoint, so much of the time went into explaining the project instead of discussing the community’s problems. Teams that had already covered part of the course arrived with sharper problem statements.
• An integrated official beats a supportive one. Teams performed best not where the council endorsed them, but where a local government representative was effectively part of the team, joining meetings and chasing information alongside the young people.
• A programme needs a defined end point – and a route past it. The Forum was a finish line, but with no follow-on funding attached, motivation dipped mid-course. Where a strong project falls outside the funder’s mandate, there should be a mechanism to hand it to a donor whose mandate covers it.