The Concept for reforming secondary education in Ukraine provides for the introduction of a modern educational environment, but technical and regulatory barriers hamper the process. In particular, this is a lack of proper access of educational institutions to the Internet.
There are 16,264 community schools in Ukraine. More than 14 thousand institutions of them, where about 3 million 311 thousand students study, do not have high-quality Internet access. 1,671 schools do not have access to the Internet at all. And in most schools, the Internet connection speed is less than 10 Mbps, and this doesn’t allow to use it for educational purposes.
Last month, the Government allocated 700 million hryvnias for internatization of such schools by its Resolution. The BRDO Office emphasizes that it is important to avoid non-transparent schemes and procure services based on a decentralized approach to ensure the effective process of connecting schools to the Internet. Indeed, the competitive principles of conducting tenders in the regions will allow to reduce corruption risks that may arise in centralized procurements.
The BRDO Office has developed relevant recommendations to connect educational institutions to the Internet presented during a press conference “Internet at every school: How will 700 million hryvnias be used?” on May 17, 2019:
- Providing high-quality connection:
– at least 100 Mbps Internet connection speed for basic educational institutions and upper secondary schools;
– at least 30 Mbps – for other institutions.
- Conducting all procurements through the Prozorro system.
- 1 school = 1 lot, which all providers can compete for on an equal basis, and this will allow to choose the best offer for each educational institution.
- Dividing the connection into connection services and services for supplying the necessary equipment (routers, switches, etc.).
- Developing a tool that will monitor the connection status and quality for each school as well as the cost of providing the Internet access.
These recommendations have already been submitted for consideration by the Ministry of Education and Science and should be approved in the near future.
Providing access to high-quality Internet for 99% of schools by the end of 2019, increasing the broadband access coverage in Ukraine as a whole and promoting the development of small and medium-sized companies-providers in the regions will be the expected results from the proper process implementation.
The event was attended by Oleksiy Honcharuk, BRDO Head, Oleksandr Fediyenko, Chairman of the UIA Board, Lyudmyla Kucheruk, Production Department Head at the SE “Open Public Finance”, Andriy Kuzmenko, Deputy Director of the SE “Prozorro” and Oleksandr Kubrakov, IT and Telecom Sector Head, BRDO.