This became known during public discussions in the Palanska AH in the Cherkasy Oblast, where a pilot project for the future use of land resources, implemented with the support of the USAID Agriculture and Rural Development Support Project, was presented.

Speaking at public discussion on “Perspectives of use of Palanska AH’s land resources”, Kateryna Ryeznikova, head of the technical department of BlomInfo-Ukraine company, presented a digital land resource accounting system based on GIZ-technologies, that will inevitably make the head of any AH jealous. Why is it so? Because land as the main AH resource is not only carefully accounted in this system, but also grouped and classified according to its intended purpose.

All data in the form of visualised maps is available for public access.

According to Mrs. Ryeznikova, at the first stage of the project about 50 requests were submitted to various institutions and organisations to collect information. The second stage was, in fact, the creation of electronic charts, and the third was a public discussion, “which created prerequisites for transparency in land management”.

The schemes, received by the Palanska AH, show all objects of natural or artificial origin, under which and/or around which land use restrictions are imposed: from electric transmission lines to animal burial sites and fly-dumpings. All economic ways (about 90 hectares), forest belt areas (215 hectares) and irrigated lands (170 hectares) are also displayed.

Farhad Ghaussy, Director of the Economic Growth Office at USAID, told about USAID's further cooperation with Ukrainian AHs.

“To achieve Ukraine’s prosperity and economic welfare, our agency is ready to cooperate with partners in both the private and public sectors,” he said. “The very result that is availability of an effective tool for hromadas’ transparent and efficient management of their own land is the main matter of our concern. This is exactly the instrument that Palanska AH has obtained. We are now getting requests from many other hromadas, that want to introduce a system similar to the one that we have helped to create in the Palanska AH. Therefore, the United States Agency for International Development has decided to expand its support of Ukrainian amalgamated hromadas and implement this model in 60 other AHs in Ukraine...”

The terms of the competition have already been developed and can be found at the link.

Meanwhile, the Palanska AH is making the next step of direct planning of its own socio-economic development. The work on the relevant document should not be very complicated, since due to USAID hromada residents already have comprehensive information on the main AH resources. It remains only to find out how to use them correctly.

The full version is available in Ukrainian – please click HERE