DREAM Project Office to be set up within Ministry for Communities, Territories and Infrastructure Development

The Ministry for Communities, Territories and Infrastructure Development of Ukraine (Ministry of Restoration) together with the Agency for Restoration in cooperation with the Open Contracting Partnership are establishing a Project Office for the development and implementation of the Digital Restoration Ecosystem for Accountable Management (DREAM).

"The establishment of the Project Office will increase the state's capacity to develop digital recovery tools. Experts of the Project Office will strengthen the team of the Ministry of Restoration and accelerate the full launch of the ecosystem," said Oleksandr Kubrakov, Deputy Prime Minister for Restoration of Ukraine, Minister for Communities, Territories and Infrastructure Development of Ukraine.

The main task of the Project Office is to develop and implement the functionality of the DREAM ecosystem, integrate registers and systems, fill in project and community pages, create analytical tools, involve key users in the ecosystem, communicate with key stakeholders, conduct training on the use of the ecosystem, etc.

"We are following the experience of implementing successful public digital solutions such as Prozorro and Prozorro.Sale, when civil society representatives with the support of international partners developed electronic systems at the request of government agencies. After the launch, the systems were transferred to the state's balance in the form of a state-owned enterprise. At the same time, the state does not spend a single kopeck of budget funds on the creation of the system," said Oleksandra Azarkhina, Deputy Minister for Communities, Territories and Infrastructure Development.

The Project Office includes IT development, user experience and communication departments. Experts of the Project Office will help the system's users, as well as key stakeholders of the recovery, both within Ukraine and abroad, to establish work with DREAM.

"The Agency for Restoration has already started implementing large projects across the country. The DREAM ecosystem will allow us to monitor the implementation of all recovery projects online. Therefore, it is crucial to engage local governments in entering their projects into the Sectoral Infrastructure Recovery Management System, which is part of DREAM and is administered by the Agency. Together with the Project Office, we will be able to fill the system with up-to-date project data as quickly as possible and engage international partners and the public in the recovery process," said Mustafa Nayyem, Head of the Agency for Restoration.

The Project Office will be headed by Viktor Nestulia, Head of Ukraine Support at Open Contracting Partnership and co-founder of the RISE Ukraine Coalition.

DREAM is a state electronic ecosystem that will provide a single digital route for all reconstruction projects. It will collect all project data online, display this data in the form of user-friendly tables, graphs and charts, and ensure the publication of open data in accordance with the global Open Contracting Data Standard.

The development of DREAM was initiated by the Ministry for Communities, Territories and Infrastructure Development together with the Agency for Restoration and the RISE Ukraine Coalition of NGOs in 2022. The development is being funded by the Open Contracting Partnership projects and RISE Ukraine Coalition member organisations, including Transparency International Ukraine and the BRDO, with the support of the British Government.

During the Ukraine Recovery Conference (URC) 2023 in London, there took place the presentation of the public module of the Digital Restoration Ecosystem for Accountable Management (DREAM).

The public module of the ecosystem is available at https://dream.gov.ua/

and allows users to view project data by sector, community and region. In addition, data on investment projects and public-private partnership projects have been made available in DREAM.

Currently, public information in DREAM is available in English, and the Ukrainian version of the data will be presented in July 2023. Since March 2023, the ecosystem has been operating in pilot mode, and during this time, representatives of communities and regions, as well as central authorities, have already submitted more than 6,000 projects and project ideas. The full functionality of the DREAM ecosystem will become available in March 2024.