Minregion develops cooperation with Belgian partners

Vitalii Bezghin, Minister for Communities, Territories and Internally Displaced Persons, met with Belgian Ambassador to Ukraine Luc Jacobs and Dirk Deprez, Director of the Belgian international cooperation agency Enabel in Ukraine.

They discussed current projects and new practical areas of cooperation.

Enabel already supports Ukraine on energy efficiency and the reconstruction of social facilities; this is an important part of community and regional development. The parties plan to continue developing this area.

Accessibility is an important area. We thank Enabel for supporting the Movement without Barriers project under the BE-Relieve Ukraine programme. The next step is to scale the project to new communities, strengthen the network of accessibility officers in towns and settlements and train specialists.

They examined in detail plans to create a network of more than 800 mobile shelters in frontline communities. The need is critical and urgent. It is therefore important to find solutions together that can be implemented more quickly.

We also presented our initiative to train 1 000 project managers for communities. We would welcome support, drawing on the experience of cooperation in education and training.

There are currently 8 partnerships between Ukrainian and Belgian communities. We will expand this list. We are already planning a joint visit to a border community in the Chernihiv region that is under regular attack.