Ukraine: Programme for Integrity and Compliance in Humanitarian Assistance I

Programme for Integrity and Compliance in Humanitarian Assistance I

Since late 2024, PTF Europe – together with our Ukrainian partner CVU Odesa – has been rolling out the first phase of an intended three-year project to survey, train, mentor and network local humanitarian organisations in Ukraine in integrity and compliance.

This project, funded by Czech Development Cooperation with a budget of €200,000 per phase, builds upon the approaches and experience of our earlier Odesa-centred pilot projects in 2022 and 2023. It stands out for its training explicitly focused on integrity and compliance, making this approach truly distinctive within the sector.

Firstly, CVU Odesa conducted structured interviewing of humanitarian organisations from Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson and Chernihiv to assess current training needs. Interview results shaped the consecutive training. The training sessions were rolled out between May and July 2025 on the following topics:

• Integrity and compliance in fundraising and project management
• Integrity and compliance in communications and marketing in social networks
• Systemic approach towards anticorruption
• Financial management

Some training sessions had to be conducted in basement shelters amid missile and drone attacks on both cities. All were fully subscribed: trainers were impressed by the trainees’ greater seriousness and competence in comparison with the first years of the war.  More than 70 local humanitarian organisations participated in the eight 2-day training courses (4 courses for wider Odesa region and 4 courses for the Chernihiv region).

Several organisations reported initiating or accelerating reforms in documentation, ethics policies, and internal controls as a direct result of the training. Networking among organisations brought together in the training spurred joint initiatives or informal alliances, with some already formalising partnerships.

The training courses are to be followed through with tailored mentoring to further embed integrity and compliance standards within the participating organisations, based on organisation-specific capacity assessments. The best performers will receive grant support tied to elaborated work plans for further internal development. We look forward to expanding the project’s reach to the Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions if the Czech funding is renewed beyond 2025.

Background

Local volunteer organisations are the backbone of humanitarian aid in Ukraine, however, they are chronically under-resourced. In the first year of the war thousands of such groups distributed mass emergency relief, most often using their own resources or ad hoc donations. Fewer in sheer number now, but with new start-ups continuing, local humanitarian groups have become more specialised, adapting to today’s complex, long-term challenges. Their flexibility, knowledge of and reach into vulnerable, hard to access and frontline sectors of the population is unmatched by international or state actors. Local and national humanitarian organisations have the agility to surge provision into underserved areas, both geographic and thematic. They now provide up to 40% of protection services.

Our project aims to help grow a swathe of local humanitarian organisations with strong integrity and compliance systems across Ukraine’s regions. That way they are qualified to become fully-fledged partners with all relevant actors, including international grant-givers. Despite some advances secured by a campaign for ‘localisation’ of humanitarian aid in Ukraine, local humanitarian organisations have largely failed to access international humanitarian funding. They cannot meet donors’ high compliance and due diligence thresholds and are faced with exclusionary vicious circles. Our project qualifies local humanitarian organisations to better meet integrity and compliance standards.