Secondary education in Ukraine is officially free-of-charge. In schools and kindergartens, however, there is a long-standing, widespread practice whereby school administrations ask parents to give them additional money for classroom repairs, new furniture, electronic equipment, etc.
In order to help parents keep an eye on purchases made by their child’s school, DOZORRO has developed special online procurement maps and published a report in August 2018 titled: “Parental Guard: Non-transparent School Procurement.”
The report contains easy, step-by-step instructions which help parents to better understand whether they really need to pay any additional money to their child’s school. Parents can also check to see whether similar or even identical procurements have already been made using state or municipal funds.
All of this procurement information is free and available via the Prozorro public procurement system. Previously, it took a lot of time and initiative, as well as technical know-how, to find the requisite data. Now, parents can quickly check purchases made by schools and kindergartens.
“I used the instruction to find out what my child’s kindergarten in Kyiv procured. After several attempts, I managed to find something, but some purchases were still missing. That’s why the public request template was especially useful. I received all of the information I needed from the district education administration regarding spending in the school” – Yevhenia Symoniuk, parent in Kyiv.
Between July-September 2018, DOZORRO published online maps for the following cities: Mykolaiv, Kyiv, Vinnytsia, Dnipro, Lviv, and Kharkiv. Using the maps, parents can select a school or kindergarten, check its procurements and find related information such as the price and quantity of goods and materials, and the names of contractors and recipients.
In addition to providing step-by-step instructions on how to check procurements, “Parental Guard: Non-transparent School Procurements” contains information on how to use the public request template. If parents are unable to locate a specific procurement, they can make a written request for this information to the relevant authority using the public request template created by DOZORRO experts. The template contains a list of common queries that anyone can use.
DOZORRO plans to create online maps of schools and kindergartens for all of Ukraine’s regional city centers by the end of 2018. Experts are working on the selection, analysis, and filtering of procurement data from the Prozorro analytics module to publish all this information on to Google Maps.
Online maps, step-by-step instructions and the special report have quickly become very popular among parents. Since July 2018, the maps have been viewed over 62,000 times. The instructions and report have been viewed 13,000 times in just a single month.
“Parental Guard: Non-transparent School Procurements” is a simple, yet powerful tool that helps parents keep an eye on state, municipal, and their own expenditures and fight corruption in kindergartens and schools.
