The FINANCIAL — A preschool in Bakhmut, a hospital in Vuhledar and a central city library in Mariupol are only 3 of 244 public facilities currently being refurbished in eastern Ukraine thanks to support from the EU and the European Investment Bank (EIB). To date, more than 5.4 million Ukrainians, including nearly 700,000 internally displaced persons, have benefited or will soon benefit from the programme.
Thanks to renovations that took place in January this year – the installation of new façade, the replacement of sewerage, water and electricity supplies – the preschool in Bakhmut can already accommodate more than 150 children from all over the city, offering them a modern and cozy environment. The hospital in Vuhledar now has an insulated roof and basement and the Korolenko Central City Library in Mariupol has undergone full thermal and energy modernisation. The library opened its doors to visitors in October this year following the major renovations which have turned the facility into a modern e-library with limitless possibilities to access various sources of information, to study and gain knowledge.
The modernisation of facilities is part of the Ukraine Early Recovery Programme, which aims to restore the social infrastructure in areas that host large numbers of internally displaced persons from eastern Ukraine. At the Ukrainian government’s request, the EIB has provided financing for the first Early Recovery Programme from 2015–2021. The multi-sector framework loan of €200 million helps local governments to recover critical municipal and transport infrastructure, and improve the living conditions of internally displaced persons and their host communities in nine regions of Ukraine: the Ukrainian government-controlled areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as Kharkiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Poltava, Odesa, Kherson and Kyiv.
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