Solutions from Ukraine: Ukrainian students and teachers receive 100,000 learning gadgets through Device Coalition
Photo: illustrative / open sources
As part of the Device Coalition project, Ukrainian schools received about 100,000 gadgets. These devices will help students and teachers continue their studies online.
The Ministry of Education and Science reported this.
What is the problem?
As the department emphasized, today, due to the full-scale invasion, about 434 thousand students in Ukraine do not have access to face-to-face education.
What is the solution?
A year ago, the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, the Olena Zelenska Foundation, and the Ministry of Digital Transformation created the Device Coalition. The goal of this association is to provide students and teachers with gadgets for online learning.
"Doing everything possible to ensure that our children, even in wartime, have unhindered access to knowledge is one of the main tasks of the Olena Zelenska Foundation. Over the entire period of its activity, we have provided more than 65 thousand schoolchildren and teachers with tablets and laptops, including devices involved within the Coalition. We are sincerely glad that through joint efforts and with the support of our international donors, we have such results today," Nina Hobacheva, Director of the Olena Zelenska Foundation, said.
To enhance online education, the Device Coalition aims to equip students and teachers with devices that ensure uninterrupted access to learning, even amid challenging wartime conditions. This initiative is also part of the infrastructure strategy within the comprehensive Offline School policy.
How does it work?
More than 14 partners have joined the initiative, including international organizations such as UNICEF, UNESCO, Theirworld, and GBC for Education.
"It is crucial for us that every child in Ukraine has access to education. To make online learning effective for everyone, we rallied over 14 international and national partners a year ago to provide devices to those who need them most. Our goal is to address the critical demand for 125,461 devices, and we've already made significant progress, providing over 100,000 devices," Yevhen Kudriavets, First Deputy Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine, said.
Achievements of the Coalition:
- 87,000 devices were provided to students.
- 12,000 were provided to teachers.
- 1,700 devices were provided to educational centers and classes of the National Secondary School.
Priority was given to frontline and border regions. The number of devices takes into account deliveries planned for March and April 2025.
According to Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, the main goal is to provide access to quality online learning for children who cannot attend school due to the war.
"In order to track the need for devices and effectively control the process of their distribution, we have launched a public dashboard. Thanks to digital tools, we can provide students with gadgets and make effective management decisions," the head of the department emphasized.
Key principles of the Coalition's work:
- Priority of recipients: Children from low-income families, internally displaced persons, children with disabilities and special educational needs receive devices first.
- Relevance of the need: Determined through the departments of education and science of regional military administrations, which conducted surveys among communities and educational institutions. Parents or legal representatives of children could apply through the school administration to receive devices.
- Transparency of distribution: Thanks to the dashboard, you can track the number of devices that have been delivered to regions and institutions. In case of discrepancies, leave a feedback for further response.
- Free use: Most devices are transferred to schools for free use by students and teachers. The institution's administration provides them to those who need them most.
For reference:
In addition to the activities of the Device Coalition, international partners have been supporting Ukrainian students and teachers with digital devices since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. In total, since 2022, more than 226,826 units of computer equipment have been transferred.
It should be noted that in the village of Pechenihy, in the Kharkiv region, an underground educational space was opened for children.
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