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The writer is chair of Theirworld and executive chair of the Global Business Coalition for Education
We are two years into the terrible war in Ukraine, and it isn’t clear when it will end. But when it does, the country must be ready to rebuild. Even amid the destruction, this is a nation planning for reconstruction.
Given the scale of devastation, the process will take decades and require an educated and skilled workforce. Equipping that workforce has been made much harder by the extensive assault on education caused by the war, alongside the dreadful loss of life.
Since Russian forces launched their full-scale invasion, more than 4,000 schools and educational institutions in Ukraine have been damaged or destroyed. Ukrainian children who were only just emerging from the Covid-19 restrictions have now endured four years of interrupted learning — they have fallen significantly behind in reading, maths and science compared to their peers in other countries.
During that period, hundreds of thousands of children have never set foot in a classroom. They have endured erratic, disrupted remote learning from homes on the frontline, bomb shelters in cities or poorly connected villages, or outside the country entirely, far from friends, teachers and loved ones. An estimated 1.9mn children are now studying fully or partly online because of the war. Of these, more than 300,000 have no access to online learning, often because their families can’t afford the necessary digital devices.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been clear that education must be the cornerstone of Ukraine’s reconstruction. Last month, his government launched the Device Coalition to mobilise the delivery of 125,000 tablets and laptops to children, teachers and schools by the middle of the year.
Theirworld and the Global Business Coalition for Education (GBC-Education) ran a $40mn project with HP, Microsoft and first lady Olena Zelenska’s Foundation to deliver 74,000 laptops to internally displaced refugees or those who had fled to Poland, Romania and Moldova. These reached an estimated 1.5mn pupils, and have allowed children like 10-year-old Eugenia to recover some sense of a normal life. She has resumed her lessons online and prepared a presentation for World Animal Protection Day to air on a national radio station — the sort of normal achievement that could have been so easily obliterated by war.
During my visit to Ukraine in September, I was moved by the determination of children, parents and teachers to develop the skills to rebuild their country. Zelenskyy has emphasised that maths and the sciences, as foundations for technical knowledge and skills, will be critical. Theirworld and GBC-Education are working with the government on an accelerated maths and science programme, including a state of the art Museum of Mathematics opening later this year in Kyiv, which will serve as a centre for maths education for decades to come. Its focus will be helping the current generation catch up on lost learning and improving the skills of maths teachers. Though located in the capital, it will feature a permanent travelling exhibition for children in rural and remote areas, reaching a potential 3,000 teachers and 300,000 children every year.
Like every subject, the introduction of maths is vital during pre-school, which determines children’s future development and lifetime prospects. The president and the ministry of education have recognised the importance of the early years, to the extent of recently opening nursery schools in underground stations in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city.
Today’s young Ukrainians will be the builders, engineers, architects, financiers, teachers, public sector workers and creatives who have to redevelop their country. They are the future of Ukraine. As this painful war drags on, we must do everything we can to support them.
