Alchevsk Community Development Partnership Reports Progress
USAID and its partners supporting community development in the eastern city of Alchevsk held a conference on June 25, 2008 to review progress made over the past 10 months. The Alchevsk partnership began in September 2007 with the signing of a memorandum of understanding between USAID, the city of Alchevsk, and the Industrial Union of Donbas and its Alchevsk Development Fund. The initiative to provide community development support came as a result of a series of several catastrophic failures of the city’s water and heating systems. The “Partnership for the Future of Alchevsk” combines public and private resources to help improve Alchevsk city services and, ultimately, the life of local residents.
The project is a comprehensive and integrated effort to stimulate city development and will serve as a model for other Ukrainian cities. It consists of five separate components: developing an economic development strategy to spur local and foreign investment; restructuring the municipal budgeting process away from line item budgeting and towards performance program budgeting; organizing and empowering civil society and non-governmental organizations in Alchevsk to make the needs and demands of Alchevsk’s citizens known, and to monitor how city government is working; reforming and modernizing Alchevsk’s heating and water treatment systems; and, community exchanges with U.S. towns to increase local knowledge of best international practices.
The success of the Alchevsk effort depends on three key elements: a commitment to corporate social responsibility and a desire to help the city of Alchevsk by the Industrial Union of Donbass through its Alchevsk Development Fund; a commitment by the Alchevsk municipal leadership and Mayor Volodymyr Choob to focus its work on economic and community development; and, a commitment by USAID to provide programs and technical expertise to support community and economic development.
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(From left) Alchevsk Mayor Volodymyr Choob and USAID/Ukraine Acting Mission Director Peter Argo listen to mid-term reports on the progress of the “Partnership for the Future of Alchevsk.”
Photo Credit: LED |
During his opening remarks, IUD Director of Corporate Communications Vasilli Arbuzov reflected the positive attitude shared by the participants: “We firmly believe that this partnership we have formed will succeed.”
USAID Acting Mission Director Peter Argo expressed satisfaction with the pace of the progress as he addressed the conference. “I am pleased with how Mayor Choob is incorporating our various projects into the city’s work and that the Industrial Union of Donbas is committed to continuing to support this effort and continuing to fund it."
USAID has brought a number of its current implementers to the project to address the challenges and resolve the problems facing the city of Alchevsk, all of whom reported on their work at the conference. USAID’s Local Economic Development (LED) project noted that it had helped the city to complete work on a five-year economic strategy that is currently working to attract new business to Alchevsk. “Today real money is coming into the city from private companies and not just from the local budget,” explained LED specialist Anatoliy Solovyev.
Olena Kotlyarska of USAID’S Municipal Budget Program explained that it had helped the city to develop 100 programs to resolve local issues as it introduced performance program budgeting in 2008. Residents immediately saw results, quite literally, when budget resources helped to purchase 5,449 new energy efficient sodium lamps, each saving $1.05 per hour compared to the old-style lamps, resulting in $13,000 in annual savings. Ihor Slobodenyuk of the Municipal Development Institute noted that through joint efforts, an operations improvement plan for the Alchevsk Water Company was now in place and that the implementation phase would begin in July. Natalya Boyko of the USAID-supported Association of Ukrainian Cities, reviewed the successes her organization was having in raising the professional standards of Alchevsk city workers, while Deputy Mayor Yevgenia Gogitidze explained how a recent visit by 10 Alchevsk sewage disposal experts to Cincinnati, Ohio, as part of USAID’s Community Connections public diplomacy effort, helped Alchevsk to better understand current waste disposal practices in the U.S.
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