In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Poland emerged as a primary destination for Ukrainian women evacuees. Women evacuees face the harsh realities of family separations, broken-up communities, prolonged uncertainty, and barriers to social integration. While the employment rate of the evacuees who settled in Poland is estimated to be relatively high, the job opportunities often do not align with the women’s professional skills and experience, and a humanitarian digital gap has emerged. 

The UNITAR digital reskilling programme was set up to urgently respond to this crisis and offer Ukrainian evacuees the opportunity to acquire new digital skills that either reinforced their previous professional experience or opened ways to explore new career paths. It covered topics such as data analytics, graphic and web design, cybersecurity, and geographic data analysis. 

The programme ran free of charge from October 2023 to March 2024 and was delivered mainly in Ukrainian. 

[The programme] highlights that you are important and gives opportunities to move forward and reveal your hidden talents. … You are stronger than you could have imagined.

-Olha Vovchok, UNITAR training programme alumna (Ukraine)

The 2023 programme was financially supported by the Government and People of Japan. It was run in partnership with Japanese, Polish, and Ukrainian government agencies, academic and educational institutions, businesses and business associations, and civil society organizations. 

Olha Vovchok

Olha Vovchok, from Cherkasy, Ukraine, participated in this programme in hopes of unlocking her potential and helping her community in a foreign country. Olha is a Ukrainian publisher who was forced to flee Ukraine at the outbreak of the war in February 2022. Olha completed the Advertising and Marketing Design track of the programme, which was organized in partnership with the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology in Warsaw.

Viktoria Podvoiska

Viktoria Podvoiska is a Ukrainian evacuee who moved to Poland at the beginning of the full-scale invasion of her country. She looks forward to when she can return to Kyiv and use her skills towards rebuilding Ukraine.

Iryna Markina

Iryna Markina is originally from Ukraine and now works remotely in Poland as head of the sales department for an insurance company. She is using her new data analytics and GIS skills and believes that age does not determine whether one can utilize IT or not. Already having professional experience helps her better integrate her new digital skills.