Fatih Şahin Фатіх Шахін Ukraine, business and international experience — since 2004
War economy

One table for everyone paying for the rebuild

By late 2022 dozens of governments and institutions were committing money to Ukraine recovery. Without a single coordinating structure, that would have produced overlap, gaps and forty separate reporting regimes.

Construction, soldier Fortepan
Photo: FOTO:Fortepan — ID 78464: Adományozó/Donor: Berkó Pál. archive copy at the Wayback Machine · CC BY-SA 3.0

By the autumn of 2022 the number of governments, institutions and agencies committing money to Ukrainian recovery had passed the point where anyone could hold it in their head.

The risk in that situation is not a shortage of money. It is three donors financing the same bridge while nobody finances the water treatment plant next to it, and a Ukrainian ministry spending its capacity writing forty different reports instead of building anything. So a coordination platform was agreed, bringing Ukraine, the G7, the European Union and the international financial institutions into one structure to align priorities, sequencing and reporting.

Why coordination is worth writing about

It sounds bureaucratic and it is genuinely important. In post-conflict reconstruction anywhere in the world, the recurring failure is not corruption or shortage. It is fragmentation: everyone funding what interests them, nobody funding the connecting infrastructure, and the recipient government spending its scarce administrative capacity on donor management.

Agreeing a single table early was a deliberate attempt not to repeat that, and it has largely held.

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