In the its second rollout of relief, the Pension Fund of Ukraine provided economic assistance to 340,000 Ukrainian individual entrepreneurs and employees to make ends meet during the pandemic.
The government paid entrepreneurs a total of Hr 2.7 billion ($100 million) in one-time economic assistance payments of Hr 8,000 ($283), e-service provider Diia reported on Telegram on June 10.
The program, aiming to help workers who were forced to shut down their businesses in ‘red’ quarantine zones, was rolled out on April 19. It was the second time the government launched an economic assistance program for entrepreneurs.
The first one was rolled out in December 2020, when Ukraine’s parliament passed changes to the state budget.
In total, Ukrainian individuals and enterprises have received almost Hr 6.5 billion ($240 million), Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal wrote on Facebook.
Not all entrepreneurs were eligible for the state financial assistance, however. Only officially registered entrepreneurs who had worked in the retail, hospitality, sports, culture or entertainment industries at least for three months could apply for relief.
Kateryna Glazkova, executive director at the Union of Ukrainian Entrepreneurs, told the Kyiv Post that any help was better than none, but one-time $280 assistance wouldn’t help businesses if they were already on the verge of bankruptcy.
However, as the government eased restrictions, new businesses started to spring up intensively this year. In the last six months, the number of Ukrainian individual entrepreneurs increased by almost 32,000 – from around 1.9 million to over 1.93 million, according to the analytics service Opendatabot.
Within six months, 44,000 Ukrainians registered as individual entrepreneurs while almost 12,000 shut down their small businesses.
The IT-community is growing the most rapidly in Ukraine – almost 16,000 new IT-specialists have registered as individual entrepreneurs so far this year. The number of individual entrepreneurs also increased in retail, food services and information services, including data processing, and website hosting and development.
At the same time, many wholesale businesses, as well as businesses in logistics and transportation, social services, radio and television broadcasting businesses took a big hit. The number of registered individual entrepreneurs in these domains has decreased significantly: almost 3,500 individual entrepreneurs who used to work in the wholesale industry were forced to shut down. The logistics sector lost over 2,800 small businesses during a half of a year.
