Every month, participants in the Public Investment Monitoring Grant Programme meet to exchange updates and share experiences. At the July meeting, they reviewed the recent “I_can” training on monitoring community public investment projects and shared their experience of implementing their projects at the local level.
About the “I_can” training programme
The grantees highlighted the practical value of the training, which was structured around the key stages of the reform – from strategy development to implementation, monitoring and oversight. This allowed the teams to gain a systematic understanding of the entire reform cycle through practical cases from communities.
Direct interaction between civil society representatives and local government officials was particularly valuable. Working together on practical tasks helped build trust and demonstrated that civil society and local authorities can effectively exchange experience in implementing the reform.
The training was held in person despite the challenging security situation. Participants noted that the face-to-face format was particularly valuable for building professional connections among teams from different regions of Ukraine.
Feedback on the training programme was highly positive. “Monitoring is not a tool for identifying mistakes or punishing anyone. Its main purpose is to identify risks in a timely manner, help communities address shortcomings, and ensure the effective use of public funds,” said Andrii Aleksandrovych, a reconstruction monitoring expert at the NGO Legal Development Network.
At the same time, Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska, founder of the Institute for Sustainable Community Development, stressed the need to raise awareness of the reform among mayors and deputy mayors who make key decisions. “Strategic planning, preparation of SPIs, and project preparation are often handled at the management level, but this information does not always reach the senior leadership of communities.”
Next steps
Following the training, the grantees continued to refine their joint methodology for monitoring public investment projects.
For example, in the PIP assessment table, the grantees identified a lack of supporting documents from communities to substantiate project prioritisation. They therefore proposed keeping this criterion in the methodology, while clearly indicating in reports when prioritisation cannot be assessed due to a lack of data and presenting this as a recommendation for further methodological improvements.
The grantees also found that minutes of community investment council meetings are a valuable source of information that is not currently included in the methodology. They proposed adding these minutes to the list of documents that should be requested as part of the monitoring process.
At the same time, monitoring procurement for large-scale projects worth hundreds of millions of hryvnias and involving hundreds of line items requires clearer guidance on which categories of procurement should be presented in detail and which can be aggregated.
The grantees identified the following systemic challenges during their monitoring:
Overall, the meeting participants agreed that quality monitoring means honestly documenting the situation on the ground, even when the findings may not always be welcome, while providing constructive recommendations for improvement.
The Public Investment Monitoring Grant Programme is implemented as part of the Public Investment Watchdog project by the Centre for Economic Strategy (CES), the Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting (IER), and the NGO Technologies of Progress, with the support of the European Union.
The project aims to enhance the transparency, efficiency, and accountability of Ukraine’s public investment management system through public monitoring, the development of digital tools, and support for civil society organizations
