Oksana Pitsyk is often told she has been lucky – but she disagrees. “I do not believe in pure luck,” the head of Smidynska council in western Ukraine says in a soft but firm voice. “Any success, even a small one, is the result of hard work.”
This kind of thinking has carried this slight but energetic woman far. Raised in a large family with limited means, Pitsyk won a full scholarship to study in Lutsk in Volyn Oblast at 14. Trained as a biologist, she never planned to go into politics. But in 2015, much to her surprise, she became the head of Smidyn, a nongovernmental organization that received funding from the United Nations Development Programme to renovate a local kindergarten.
“Everyone was invited to the initial meeting. I walked in as a resident and walked out as president,” laughs the 32-year-old who until then had been coordinating activities in the local school where her two children study. Other projects followed, bringing life and hope to a rural community over 500 kilometers from the capital, where not all roads are asphalted and some homes lack in-house toilets.
It was the beginning of a career change. Two years later, Pitsyk was elected head of the local government in Smidynka, a community of six villages that recently merged as part of Ukraine’s decentralization process. Since 2014, the reforms have given small communities like Smidynka additional power and resources to advance their development.
Overcoming mental barriers
As the first female council leader, and a young one at that, Pitsyk is used to fighting stereotypes about her age and gender. “When I was campaigning in October 2017, I met a group of residents and I saw the skepticism on their faces,” she recalls. “A man said, ‘You are a child. How are you going to lead our community?’ I stressed the moral values that my parents passed on to my brothers and sisters. He and the others stayed to listen to me, and I understood that I could make it.”
She is in the minority – In 2018, only 17% of the heads of Ukraine’s local governments were women.
Deeply rooted gender stereotypes cause women to be the first to doubt that they can succeed, notes Pitsyk. “Everyone can cook borscht, even men, but not everyone can manage a community. That ability does not depend on whether you are a man or a woman.”
Those are not the only attitudes she has to confront. “The decentralization reform empowered small communities like ours, but it is not always a smooth ride,” reflects Pitsyk. “The Soviet mentality of waiting for the state to do it all for you is still very much alive… People do not trust the national government, they have heard the word ‘reforms’ too many times. But they can trust local authorities because we all know each other. We are part of the same community.”
Personal relationships are key, as she first discovered through her work at Smidyn. “In 2016, we decided to organize a general clean-up of Smidynka before Easter. We had one coordinator in each of the five village neighborhoods, but the former local head actually encouraged residents not to do anything. They did not listen and the village was beautifully cleaned.”
In her current role, even ostensibly minor decisions like replacing an orchard of old and unproductive apple trees with new saplings can be unpopular. “It requires a lot of patience and negotiations,” the biologist-turned-administrator smiles.
One of the biggest challenges in this agricultural region is persuading small farmers to collaborate, given the economic benefits of forming cooperatives. “It is a painful point,” she adds. “You say cooperative and people hear Soviet kolkhoz. It will take some time to communicate the benefits of independent farmers working together.”
Pitsyk has surprising sources of inspiration, like Margaret Thatcher, the UK’s first female prime minister, who remains a polarising figure. “Thatcher was controversial, but she had the courage to take and implement unpopular decisions that she knew would benefit the population in the long term,” she says as she types a message in the group she set up with other local female activists – the “Thatcher group.”
A challenging road
The journey has been bumpy, just like the road connecting the villages to larger cities such as Lutsk. It takes over two hours to drive the 100 kilometres to the regional capital.
“Ask people what their main problem is, and they would say ‘the road’,” she adds. “But I think it is depopulation.” As employment opportunities are lacking, residents, mainly men, travel to Poland, a mere 40 kilometers away, in ever-larger numbers in search of work. Pitsyk knows this far too well – her husband is among them. As an administrator, she is lobbying to get businesses to set up shop in the territory to stimulate the economy.
“Many people simply think that I receive sacks of cash delivered to my office,” she gestures. “But if businesses come and work, the road will follow.” In fact, a lot has been done already. The hromada’s budget has grown to Hr 20 million, of which Hr 4.5 million is local revenue, mainly from land leases. Residents also have access to a health clinic and a school for children up to the age of 16, plus a post office, an ATM and a police station.
Pitsyk is on her way to transforming the municipality as consummately as is possible, and as she walks along the banks of a nearby lake Pitsyk explains other new developments in Smidynka. The community recently built an open-air gym and a playground, and a decked area with stalls and a picnic facility will follow.
In her efforts, she is supported by Volyn Local Government Development Centre which offers training on everything from gender-responsive budgeting to seminars for smart development of amalgamated hromadas to trainings on the secrets of Facebook.
Asked to assess her political journey, she flips the question. “I do not consider myself a politician,” she says, “but rather an administrator. I do not identify with any political faction. My people and my community are my party: I respond to them.”
About the author
Monica Ellena is an Italian journalist currently based in Kyiv. She is the former editor of Chai Khana, an award-winning platform covering gender, conflict and displacement in the South Caucasus. A former staff journalist for ABC News and Bloomberg News in London, she has reported from the Balkans, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union for both leading and specialized publications like the Financial Times and Eurasianet. She has extensive experience on gender and refugee issues in UN-led missions from Kosovo to Afghanistan and regularly conducts training for journalists on journalism ethics and gender and conflict-sensitive reporting.”
