Charity fund delivers 5,000 free mobile tablets to socially vulnerable Ukrainian children
BGV Charity Fund, the German charity organization #WeAreAIlUkrainians, and non-governmental organisation Plan International undertook a joint project to ensure access to education for vulnerable internally displaced children.
Through the support of international funds and local Ukrainian partners, 5,000 Ukrainian schoolchildren received tablets to aid their learning.
The telecommunications partner, Vodafone Ukraine, provided stable access to online classes: all gadgets are equipped with SIM cards with prepaid 4G Internet for one year.
The project's geographical scope encompassed seven regions across the country: Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Zhytomyr, Mykolaiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy.
The logistics partner — the Nova Poshta postal company — delivered tablets to 518 towns at its own expense. 5,000 children received gadgets for free.
With the support of the Office of the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, within the project's scope, BGV and partners provided 2,353 girls and 2,647 boys aged 6 to 14 with gadgets. Among them are children with disabilities, kids from large, low-income, and single-parent families, orphans and children deprived of parental care, and those affected by hostilities and armed conflicts.
Together with our partners, we've developed a brochure, including recommendations on how to use learning devices and links to resources and apps both for formal education — Ukrainian online school platform, or the 'Can't Wait to Learn' app and more — and for informal learning, like safety issues or critical thinking development, which is also extremely important now, says Natalia Katashynska, Coordinator of Education in Emergency Situations, Plan International in Ukraine.
Separately, we suggested psychological support resources for children, as well as recommendations for children with disabilities.
Helping children and educational initiatives are one of the priority areas of the BGV fund's work. Our charity organization is grateful to all project partners for the opportunity to provide free tablets to 5,000 internally displaced children, says Polina Aldoshyna, director of the BGV Charity Fund.
We adopted a highly responsible approach to the targeted distribution of gadgets. In preparation for the project, lists of families with children meeting the project's criteria were compiled with the assistance of the Office of the Ukrainian Ombudsman and through the dedicated efforts of regional social services. Moreover, we also helped families who were not digitized and could not apply online on their own. Employees of the regional offices of the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights visited such families and helped them register and fill out an application. Thanks to effective partnership, within two months, our fund implemented one of the largest projects worth more than €1 million.
According to UNICEF, since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, education has been interrupted for 5.7 million children.
Online education became the only option to continue learning. Statistics from the Institute of Educational Analytics show that as of May 2023, 1.46 million children attended classes remotely, and 1.2 million schoolchildren studied in the hybrid form.
Ukrainian Minister of Education and Science Oksen Lisovyi reported that, as of late July 2023, more than 1,300 educational institutions in Ukraine were affected by hostilities, with over 300 establishments being destroyed and more than 1,000 being damaged and subject to examination. This number may increase as the war continues and the destruction of the educational infrastructure shows no signs of stopping.
