Author: Ganna Seyid-zada

 

The town of Nakło nad Notecią in northern Poland is not an obvious place to look for the future of a Ukrainian municipality. Yet in the autumn of 2023, an official from Tulchyn, a municipality in Vinnytsia oblast, spent seven weeks inside its town hall studying something most people would rather not think about: household waste. Within a year, schools in Tulchyn were running waste-sorting classes, specialists had analysed what the municipality throws away, and cameras had gone up at illegal dumping sites. An idea had travelled a thousand kilometres home in one person's notebook.

That journey is exactly what the Good Governance Internship Program, implemented by Solidarity Fund PL in cooperation with U-LEAD with Europe, was designed to make possible.

 

Where European integration meets daily life

Ukraine's path to the European Union is usually told as a story about laws brought into line with EU rules. That work is essential, but it is only part of the picture: rules adopted in Kyiv have to be applied somewhere, and much of that happens locally. Municipalities deliver many everyday services, plan and manage local development projects, and are where people most directly experience whether public institutions are transparent, accountable and open to participation. Strengthening administrative capacity at local level is therefore one part of preparing Ukraine for membership, alongside the reforms led by central government.

Poland is a natural place to learn. Its local self-government was rebuilt from 1990 onwards and decentralised further at the end of that decade, and its municipalities then had to adapt to EU membership in 2004: planning development strategically, absorbing European funds, managing projects to European standards and, often, cooperating with their neighbours to do so. Their experience is not a template for Ukraine to copy. Ukrainian municipalities work under different laws and, above all, in wartime. But it is a rich source of practical lessons about what works, what does not, and why.

The programme was meant to do more than familiarise. Its aim was for Ukrainian officials to gain hands-on knowledge, build professional networks and turn what they had seen into concrete initiatives at home: practical learning strengthens the people who run local institutions, stronger institutions deliver better results for residents, and communities that deliver are better prepared for life inside the European Union. The quickest way to learn how local self-government works in an EU member state is not a lecture or a study tour. It is a desk in a Polish municipal office, a mentor at the next one, and enough time for the questions that only arise once you see the daily routine from within.

 

A desk, a mentor and seven weeks

Twenty-five officials from Ukrainian municipalities of up to 50,000 residents took that desk. They came from fifteen oblasts, from Rivne to Dnipropetrovsk, and were hosted by twenty-five municipalities across Poland, each intern paired with a personal mentor from the host administration.

Getting there took work. Before departure, participants passed a Polish language course, administrative vocabulary included and followed a series of webinars on the EU accession process, the Polish model of local self-government and the funding instruments available for Polish-Ukrainian cooperation.

What set the model apart was time. A seminar transmits information and a short study visit offers a glimpse of a showcase project, but seven weeks inside a working administration is long enough to see how decisions are reached. Interns worked alongside experienced Polish counterparts instead of observing them from a conference room, and each placement was built around the participant's own field: a specialist in social services went deep into social services, an environmental officer into waste and ecology. Learning was directly usable in the job each would return to.

And every intern faced the same final assignment: come home with a project your municipality can implement. That requirement is what turned an educational exercise into a bridge between two administrations.

 

What the ideas became

Twenty-five project ideas came back. A grant competition, made possible by U-LEAD with Europe, selected five of them, and through the first half of 2024 they were turned into working projects.

In Smyha, a village in Rivne oblast, the idea became a Public Health Centre, a social and medical hub designed to improve residents' access to emergency care. In Varash, seniors gained a space of their own, where classes in computer literacy, sewing and cooking run week after week. In Poninka, local young people took charge of the municipality's waste system, hydraulic press and sorting bins included. Tulchyn carried out its waste management plan, and Sofiivka opened a youth space in one of its villages.

Not everything went according to plan, and in one case that turned out to be good news. Two municipalities  whose applications did not win the competition, Novyi Buh and Chuhuiv, chose not to shelve their ideas. They found other funding and implemented their projects anyway. For a programme intended to help communities act with confidence and independence, that is an encouraging sign: the internship had produced not only plans, but the determination and know-how to carry them through without the original grant.

The results can be read in three stages. The internships produced twenty-five project ideas grounded in what participants had seen working in Poland. Back in Ukraine, seven of them were delivered, five with grant support and two through alternative funding. The third stage, lasting benefit for residents and for the administrations themselves, will take longer to show: it depends on whether the new services keep running and whether the officials apply the same approach to the next problem on their desk. That is the real test of learning-based institutional development.

 

Partnerships that stayed

Some of the most durable results may be the ones that fit no indicator. Having worked side by side for seven weeks, many interns and their hosts kept in touch, and eight inter-municipal partnerships grew out of the programme. Seven link Ukrainian and Polish municipalities and were formalised through letters of intent and agreements. The eighth joins two Ukrainian municipalities, Rozhyshche and Rozhnyativ, whose representatives met each other in Poland. The agreements cover education, youth policy, the environment and social services.

An agreement is a starting point rather than a result, but it matters. It gives a relationship formed between individuals an institutional home that can survive staff changes and outlast the programme. It offers a framework for continued exchange, joint local development initiatives and mutual learning, in which Polish municipalities can also gain from Ukrainian practice. And it adds to the web of direct ties between Ukrainian and European communities, built from the bottom up.

 

Beyond the internship: building lasting municipal capacity

The first edition of the programme offers three lessons that reach beyond twenty-five participants.

The first is that practical learning produces practical change. Principles such as transparency, participation and evidence-based planning are easy to state and harder to apply. Seven weeks inside a Polish municipality let officials see how they shape everyday administrative work, and seven implemented projects show that this knowledge can travel home and take root.

The second is that partnerships extend the reach of individual learning. One official can bring back a good idea; a formal partnership can keep ideas flowing in both directions for years. The eight partnerships are not yet proof of long-term impact, but they create the conditions for it.

The third is that strong local administration is essential to Ukraine's European future. Municipalities are expected to carry a large share of post-war recovery and reconstruction. They must remain resilient under pressure, deliver public services more effectively, plan their development with care and prepare for the practical demands of EU membership. None of this can be achieved through one-off training; it requires sustained investment in people and institutions, with returns that appear over years rather than weeks.

Even in wartime, Ukrainian municipalities continue to develop and to bring European practice into their daily work. The first edition of the Good Governance Internship Program showed what a desk in a Polish town hall can set in motion. The programme continues with a new edition in 2026-2027, again implemented by Solidarity Fund PL in cooperation with U-LEAD with Europe, offering the chance to build on these first results and on the relationships that grew out of them.

 

---

This publication has been produced with the assistance of the European Union and its member states Germany, Denmark, France, Austria, Poland and Slovenia. The contents of this publication are the sole responsibility of its authors and do not necessarily represent the views of U-LEAD with Europe, the European Union and its member states Germany, Denmark, France, Austria, Poland and Slovenia.

 

Ganna Seyid-zada is an International Partnerships Advisor at U-LEAD with Europe Programme (GIZ), where she supports cooperation between Ukrainian and European municipalities and the development of international partnerships that contribute to local development and institutional capacity-building. With over 12 years of professional experience in international cooperation, project management and humanitarian response, she has worked with the Ukrainian Red Cross Society and State Emergency Service of Ukraine, gaining extensive experience in coordinating projects and fostering collaboration among diverse stakeholders. Her work focuses on strengthening connections between municipalities, facilitating the exchange of experience and supporting Ukrainian municipalities in building the capacity needed for recovery, sustainable development and Ukraine’s European integration.