As Europe’s second-poorest country, Ukraine relies on local and international organizations to protect disadvantaged children.
According to the Charities Aid Foundation World Giving Index, which ranks countries on how likely people are to volunteer and give to charitable causes, helping people is becoming increasingly popular in Ukraine, which saw the ninth-largest increase in charitable activity compared to 2020.
Ukraine is now the 20th most charitable country on earth, just one place behind the U.S and two places ahead of the United Kingdom. The index does not measure size of donations, but rather the number of people who say they donate. While they don’t have much to give, on average, nearly 43% of Ukrainians said they donated to charity in 2020.
Even so, many charities struggle to raise enough money to fully meet children’s needs. International organizations have traditionally helped fill the gap. Their funding greatly increased after Russia invaded and occupied Crimea and Donbas in 2014, displacing 1.6 million people, including 734,000 children.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic has hurt the international charity sector. Many recipients of foreign aid, who rely on single-source funding from international charities and companies, suddenly experienced reduced financial support and contributions.
ChildAid to Eastern Europe, a Christian U. K.-registered charity specializing in support of children in Belarus, Moldova, Siberia and Ukraine, has identified four priority issues facing children in Ukraine today: children with disabilities, orphans, social orphans and child poverty.
Children with disabilities
According to ChildAid, the single largest area of concern in the children’s charitable sector in Ukraine relates to disability and homes to accommodate children with disablities.
A study conducted by the Ukrainian Center for Public Opinion Research, Socioinform, revealed that almost 50% of charitable donations in Ukraine go towards helping treat or manage serious illnesses and disability.
Out of nearly 8 million children currently living in Ukraine, 167,000 are registered as suffering with disabilities, according to UNICEF, or the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund.
More than 70,000 children with disabilities in Ukraine live in residential care institutions, according to the Ministry of Social Policy.
According to a report by U.K. charity Hope and Homes for Children, Ukraine still struggles with the legacy of Soviet approaches to orphans and children with disabilities. The state lacks the resources to provide real care to children and instead prefers to separate them into orphanages and mental institutions.
These institutions are heavily criticized by UNICEF, which accused them of causing further harm to children, preventing them from growing up in loving, family environments and promoting discrimination and exclusion.
The government currently provides social assistance to children with disabilities who are raised in foster homes or institutions with at least Hr 15,000 ($561) per month, per child. This does not prevent many children from slipping through the cracks.
Financial support for children living with families is often extremely low. In the city of Sumy, a provincial capital of more than 250,000 people located 366 kilometers northeast of Kyiv, unemployed parents caring for critically ill children receive just Hr 1,769 ($66) per month in social contributions from local authorities.
This lack of government support is often remedied by international aid.
The U. S. Christian charity “Mission to Ukraine’’ sends over $800,000 a year trying to help children with disabilities at an orphanage in Zhytomyr, a city of 266,000 people located 140 kilometers west of Kyiv.
One child used to die per month at the Romaniv orphanage in the city and the children were treated like “untamed animals,” Mission to Ukraine Director Steve Boles said in an interview with Syracuse University. He said his project helped lift some of the stigma for people with disabilities, making it easier for them to attend support services and go out in the public.
Abandoned by parents
According to Leonid Lebediev, former aide to Ukraine’s social policy ministry, 90% of children who leave orphanages are not prepared for independent life. Many are prone to violence, and surveys find up to 23% may end up homeless.
Not all people in orphanages have deceased parents. Many are “social orphans,” whose families are unwilling or unable to care for them, according to several nonprofits. The lack of love and support may lead to developmental issues or violent tendencies, they say.
According to ChildAid, there are currently around 100,000 orphaned children in Ukraine. According to the charity, “orphans are abandoned by their own family due to lack of finances to support them, however, other reasons include alcoholism, abuse, crime, illness and poor medical health.”
New Beginning, a ChildAid program based in an orphanage in Mukachevo, Zakarpattia Oblast city of 86,000 people located nearly 800 kilometers southwest of Kyiv, provides orphaned young adults with education, religious instruction and classes on personal finances, home economics, coping with problems and living outside the orphanage.
Child poverty
According to UNICEF, the COVID‑19 pandemic has worsened child poverty in Ukraine, pushing about 1.4 million more children into poverty. Children in Ukraine represent 18% of the population, yet 45% of the poor.
UNICEF predicts that the absolute poverty rate in Ukraine will rise from 27% to 44% following economic pressures caused by the pandemic. This naturally has a knock-on effect across the charitable industry, worsening access and affordability of many essential services for children.
Mission Without Borders, an international Christian charity, sponsors impoverished children and their families through individual grants, helping children to attain sponsorships and vocational training, and to help families in becoming fully financially independent.
According to the charity’s website, it has sponsored over 4,000 children, provided 18 students with scholarships and sent 9,000 Ukrainian families a “Christmas Love Box,” which contains basic food supplies and Christmas treats for families and their young children. Over 2,500 of these boxes were received by families internally displaced by Russia’s aggression in eastern Ukraine.
International charities are similarly collaborating with the Ukrainian government to help ensure that government support is both effective and targeted.
UNICEF aids the Ukrainian government in implementing macroeconomic policies which target child poverty at its source. It focuses on new techniques for measuring and recognizing child poverty, which aids the Ukrainian government in developing new child-centered family policies.
The charitable fund also helps the Ministry of Finance to improve existing public expenditure on children, helping prioritize economic support for children in the state budget.
UNICEF blames Ukraine’s often ineffective support for underprivileged families on “a combination of welfare programs inherited from the Soviet Union…that are predominantly categorical, fragmented, often with overlapping objectives and poorly adapted to current needs.”
Ukraine’s decentralized reforms, supported by international organizations such as UNICEF, hope to see local authorities take charge of economic affairs, which will help tailor the needs of social services to local children.
