The Ministry of Economy is working with the business community to prepare a Human Capital Resilience Charter that will help overcome barriers to the labour market. This was announced by Yuliia Svyrydenko, First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy of Ukraine, at a meeting of the Barrier-Free Council.

“During the URC 2024 in Berlin, we launched work on the Human Capital Resilience Charter, which should become one of the tools to overcome barriers in the labour market. Adherence to the Charter’s principles by businesses will help increase the resilience of companies to crisis situations, promote gender equality in pay, and create an inclusive environment for people with disabilities, internally displaced persons, and youth. It will promote the creation of a policy to support women and men veterans in business, including their employment and mentoring support. And it will also facilitate access to new training and professional development opportunities,” said Yuliia Svyrydenko.

According to her, the Human Capital Resilience Charter is to be presented at the Ukraine Recovery Conference 2025. Currently, 20 large Ukrainian employers have joined the work on the document, and the number of Charter participants is planned to be expanded to 500.

The Human Capital Resilience Charter is a draft set of principles that businesses must adhere to in order to make their work environment barrier-free. In particular, these principles include:

• promoting the health and well-being of employees – to implement it, businesses can introduce corporate mental health programmes, flexible working practices and reduce the risk of burnout;
• providing access to education and professional skills development – these may include career guidance, retraining, and professional development programmes;
• fair remuneration or the creation of flexible, hybrid and remote forms of work;
• support for veterans and those mobilised through job security and flexibility;
• creating technological solutions for different users, such as employees with hearing or visual impairments;
• developing policies that take into account the needs of parents, guardians, single mothers, etc.

It is also planned to create an online platform that will allow companies to access methodological materials and share best practices for implementing barrier-free employment principles.

Human-centred business standards are also being developed. Thus, the Ministry of Economy, in cooperation with business partners, will introduce a monitoring system to help companies achieve human-centred status.

Background

The goal of the barrier-free policy is to create an unhindered environment for all groups of the population, ensuring equal opportunities for everyone to exercise their rights. It is about access to work, information, education, services, the ability to move around freely, to socialise and to participate in community life. Accessibility policies should be mainstreamed into all long-term decisions and programmes at national and local levels.

The No Barriers initiative was launched by the First Lady of Ukraine, Olena Zelenska. In 2021, the Government approved the National Strategy for Creating a Barrier-Free Environment until 2030. This year, the Government approved the Action Plan for 2023-2024 to implement the Barrier-Free Strategy.

To create a barrier-free space, a temporary advisory body, the Barrier-Free Council, was established under the Cabinet of Ministers. Its activities are defined in the Regulation on the Barrier-Free Council.

The development of the Human Capital Resilience Charter was announced at the Ukraine Recovery Conference 2024, which took place in June 2024 in Berlin. The initiative is being implemented by the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Folke Bernadotte Academy (FBA), with the support of Korn Ferry Ukraine.