On 25 April 2023, Minister of Education and Science Oksen Lisovyi met with a delegation of the Group of Friends of Ukraine to UNESCO. The participants discussed establishing sustainable cooperation with an international coalition of donors and partners to create a safe educational process, restore damaged and destroyed educational institutions and continue reforming general secondary, vocational and higher education.

"Safety is our priority, so we are currently making every effort to create the necessary conditions for offline education. However, in cases where this is not possible for security reasons, our task is to introduce high-quality online learning. And we are very grateful to our partners who are actively helping us with this," said Oksen Lisovyi.

In 2022, UNESCO demonstrated the powerful mobilisation of 25 members of the Global Education Coalition (GEC) to support Ukraine's education system and all stakeholders in the educational process in Ukraine.

Thanks to UNESCO's assistance:

- Ukrainian educational institutions received 50,000 Chromebooks from Google;

- Ukrainian higher education institutions have free access to Google premium licences to optimise the learning process in a distance format;

- almost 60,000 students received free certificates for studying on the Coursera platform;

- an online platform for the National Multisubject Test (NMT) and transparent admission to higher education institutions of Ukraine was created.

In the near future, negotiations are planned to hold NMT for Ukrainian children abroad, with 31 countries having confirmed the main session of NMT-2023.

In cooperation with UNESCO and with the support of the Ministry of Education and Science, a number of joint projects are being implemented, including a programme to overcome the negative mental health consequences of students affected by the war and provide them with psychosocial support, with financial support from the Government of Japan. This activity is part of the National Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Programme under the patronage of the First Lady of Ukraine.

As a reminder, Oksen Lisovyi and Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Japan to Ukraine Matsuda Kuninori discussed cooperation in education and science between the two countries.