EGAP CHALLENGE, competition of projects in E-governance sphere, starts today

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Kyiv, April 14, 2016. EGAP CHALLENGE, national competitions of projects in E-governance sphere, starts today, informed Oleksandr Ryzhenko, Head of the State Agency for E-Governance in Ukraine at a press briefing at Ukraine Crisis Media Center. “There is a demand for E-governance instruments in Ukraine helping to influence the authorities and control them,” he said. The competition will last nine months and choose 15-20 projects to be implemented.

According to Viktor Lyakh, president of the East Europe Foundation, there will be competition stages. Survey of social needs will be conducted and priorities identified at the first stage. The next stage, stimulation, will take place in May, involving discussion of the main ideas. Following this, “creative weekends” will take place. “This is informal communication, informal work to make the ideas permanent, engage the biggest number of people to cooperation, get understanding of the ways of engaging users and building long-standing model for making decisions in future,” explained Lyakh. After that, an independent jury will choose finalists. The following stage, incubation, will include intensive three days’ training, following which the teams will present their business plans to the jury.

“Ukrainian youngsters are eager to create. We can see they want to create changes with their own hands. Only technologies can become a platform for these changes,” said Valeriy Fishchuk, Cisco Ukraine regional manager. According to him, Ukraine has enormous human resource, regularly hitting 50 top countries list in Global Innovation Index. “[Such projects] are very important to involve young specialists of civil society into E-governance development. We can see that anything created in the world, any changes are done by young people using advanced mobile technology,” believes Penko Dinev, Country General Manager, IBM Ukraine.

Four regional centers are functioning within the framework of EGAP CHALLENGE: SpaceHub in Dnipropetrovsk, IHub in Vinnytsia, ImpactHub in Odesa and Local Development Fund in Lutsk. The competition takes place with support and financing of Switzerland. The project details are available on the Facebook page.

The Internet reach in Ukraine amounts to 67% of the population. According to surveys, 25% are ready to use electronic media to influence and control the public authorities.