The Nekhvoroshcha municipality in the Poltava region has created an electronic database of available vacant premises for permanent or temporary housing of IDPs.

Olha Khomenko, Deputy Head of the village of Nekhvoroshcha, told about it, as reported by Ukrinform with reference to the U-LEAD with Europe Programme.

“The housing stock is a list of houses for which the municipality has acquired property rights by recognising them as deceased estates. Simply put, we are talking about housing that has not been used or inherited for some time, which is numerous in rural areas, and not only in our municipality. We are already registering these buildings and premises and will provide them for the use of IDPs who have decided to stay with us. The housing will be provided as social or state-owned,” said the deputy head.

Olha Khomenko noted that rural areas usually have a shortage of professionals in certain areas of work, so creating housing for internally displaced persons provides an opportunity to attract professionals in various fields to the municipality.

“We are now actively looking for a family of IDP doctors who would like to stay and work here. We can offer them our personal housing. There are already some agreements with the Poltava Petroleum Company, which will finance the purchase of the apartment and its repair and sign it off to the village council,” said Olha Khomenko.

According to her, the municipality plans to repair the houses from the housing stock and convert non-residential premises into residential ones at the expense of the state subvention for reconstruction. An example is a local bath, which has all the necessary utilities, so it would not be difficult to convert it into residential housing. There are plans to use it to create 4 apartments.

While the work with the housing stock continues, IDPs in the Nekhvoroshcha municipality can stay in shelters specially created at the local municipal institutions by the decision of the municipality’s executive committee.

According to Iryna Balybina, Head of the Regional Office of U-LEAD with Europe in the Poltava region, Poltava region has experience in handling IDPs from previous years: as of 1 January 2022, more than 22,000 IDPs were already registered in the region. This experience has helped the region to organise the efforts of protecting the rights of evacuees quite quickly and efficiently. To date, due to hostilities, the region still has an almost 20% increase in population. Organisational efforts to assist the regional military administration with IDPs are carried out by numerous NGOs and local philanthropist businesses as well as volunteers who also already had relevant previous experience.