Two years after the nation’s development goals were defined by President Petro Poroshenko in the administration’s Ukraine 2020 strategy, the Cabinet of Ministers during its meeting on April 3 has passed its own action plan to be completed also in three years.
Top priorities, according to Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, are privatization, healthcare, education, as well as land and pension reforms.
The plan’s goals in many ways repeat the ones mentioned in the president’s strategy. Without noting the president’s plan, Groysman urged “all the authorities to consolidate their efforts” to achieve the goals.
“This plan is for people to feel the changes,” he said. “Ukraine has a plan that is absolutely real.”
According to Vadym Miskyi, who heads the advocacy department at Reanimation Package of Reforms, there is chaos in Ukraine with all the uncoordinated strategic documents. However, he said that this is the first attempt of Ukrainian government to plan for longer period of time than one year, and it’s a positive move.
“We will see though whether they included all the experts’ propositions to the plan, and whether they will be able to implement it,” Miskyi told the Kyiv Post. He said it’s too early to comment the entire document, as it has just been published, and it will take some time to analyze it.
Talking at the Cabinet meeting, Groysman assured that the government’s plan is a result of thoughtful and careful cooperation with experts and dozens of roundtables.
He said the government has defined five main goals for the next four years: economic growth, effective state management, development of the human resources, rule of law and fighting corruption, and defense and security.
In his words, all big goals are split into smaller specific steps, which will be delegated to the separate ministries. The plan, Groysman added, includes infrastructure, healthcare, education and energy objects for all Ukraine’s Oblasts, including roads, bridges, hospitals and schools that will be built in the nearest future.
Groysman also noted that the action plan, if followed, will allow Ukrainian government to significantly increase pensions for the retirees not later than in October.
First Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Economic Development and Trade of Ukraine Stepan Kubiv promised that the indicators of the progress under the new governmental plan would be clear and specific, as well as transparent and open for public access. He did not specify them though.
Ukraine’s Finance Minister Oleksandr Danylyuk added that the details of the government’s strategy will also end up in the draft budget for 2018-2019 years, as well as in the budget policy for 2018 to 2020 that Finance Ministry has to present this summer. Ukrainian parliament recently voted for a law on medium-term budget planning, which would allow Ukrainian government to distribute the budget money more effectively.
