Monitoring data traditionally shows the growth of local budgets, effective local use of government funds, expansion of hromadas’ powers in various fields, and other positive trends. In the future, with the adoption of the laws necessary for decentralisation by the Verkhovna Rada, the pace of the reform implementation will increase even further.

This was stated by Vyacheslav Nehoda, First Deputy Minister of Regional Development, Construction, Housing and Communal Services, who was presenting data on monthly monitoring of the decentralisation process and local self-government reforming at the meeting of the Ukrainian Association of Rayon and Oblast Councils on 10 November 2017.

"The monitoring task is to show not only the strengths and achievements of the reform. It should identify trends that need to be analyzed and, if necessary, corrected. For example, we see that the percentage of amalgamated hromadas with a population of less than 5 thousand people is increasing. And that is not good. Let's say, the modelling of the process of administrative services provision through the ASCs demonstrates that the most effective system can be created in hromadas with more than 10 thousand people. Only in this case, the ASC provides the maximum number of services and is profitable for the hromada. There is a similar situation with other services. Experience shows that it is more difficult to provide high-quality services in small hromadas. Therefore, we must jointly work with hromadas, reminding them that the voluntary amalgamation process should not be neglected, because our goal is not aggregation, but establishment of hromadas capable of providing our residents with the maximum range of high-quality services," Vyacheslav Nehoda appealed to the representatives of the oblast and rayon councils.

He also noted that hromadas, even the big ones, have already realized that they are not able to solve some local issues alone: i.e. waste collection, recycling and reuse, road repairs, transport connections etc. Therefore, an increase in the number of agreements on hromadas’ cooperation is one of the most dynamic indicators of monitoring. Just over the last two months about 50 hromadas joined the inter-municipal consolidation of efforts. Today 108 cooperation agreements are being implemented. More than 500 hromadas collaborate in various fields to provide high-quality services to their residents.