This research was prepared with the support of the MATRA Programme of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine and with financial support from Sweden within the framework of the Transparency International Ukraine institutional development program.

The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the official position of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine or the Government of Sweden.

Research methodology

The “EU integration alignment” of this study, as in previous installments, is grounded in the provisions of the Ukraine Facility Plan and in the recommendations of the European Commission’s Enlargement Reports for 2023–2025. In particular, in the 2025 Report the EC called for stronger budget transparency and medium-term budget planning as elements of more mature fiscal policy, and gave special attention to public procurement. These priorities are also reflected in the EU-aligned set of criteria for Ukraine across the three most important clusters: the local level is mentioned there only in the context of public procurement. 

The “Public Finance” indicators also draw on international approaches to assessing budget transparency and effectiveness, in particular the OECD Budget Transparency Toolkit and the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) framework. Program analysts maintain that an integral part of budget transparency is making information about local finances clear and accessible to a wide range of users. For this reason, the subindex also checked whether dedicated thematic sections exist and whether they meet the “single point of entry” principle.

In the “Public Finance” block, analysts examined two dimensions: how local authorities manage funds and resources, and how transparently they communicate this and provide access to the information. For a resident, transparency in the budget area means the ability to check whether their taxes are being used effectively, whether spending matches people’s needs, and whether local authorities are abusing their powers. For partners and potential investors, openness in financial processes signals how efficiently and honestly a city will manage their resources. Transparent management of the community’s budget and resources is the foundation for trust between authorities, residents, and international partners. 

Indicators of planning quality, procurement, and lease and privatization auctions can be affected by external factors — from the relocation of businesses and taxpayers to damaged infrastructure. Despite these challenges, the program encourages communities to follow European budgeting rules. One example is keeping the deviation between actual and planned budget revenues or expenditures to a minimum. This is the European standard for assessing budget credibility — that is, the authorities’ ability to stick to their own plans and allocate resources effectively.

The pilot sample included the city councils of 10 regional capitals (Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Kropyvnytskyi, Lutsk, Lviv, Odesa, Poltava, Kharkiv, Khmelnytskyi, Chernihiv) and the city of Kyiv. 

Municipalities were assessed against 40 indicators, with a maximum score of 100 points. The assessment was carried out through automated analysis of data from the national Open Budget, Prozorro, and Prozorro.Sale systems (20 indicators) and through the conventional review of information availability on the official websites of local self-government bodies (also 20 indicators). 

For 20 criteria related to the publication of important budget information, cities could earn up to 46 points. Here, analysts checked compliance with the “single point of entry” principle for two website sections: the local budget section (17 criteria) and the public procurement section (2 criteria). They reviewed the availability of key documents — the budget regulations, forecasts, decisions on the budgets for 2025 and 2026, quarterly reports, local debt management programs, and so on. Separately, they recorded how cities inform residents about their involvement in the budget process, and whether city councils submit data on the hierarchy of subordinate contracting authorities to the BI Prozorro analytical resource.

The automated part of the assessment covered 20 criteria with a maximum of 54 points. The data was retrieved through API endpoints from state information systems, ensuring accuracy. Specifically, 7 indicators based on data from the Open Budget public web portal assessed the quality of the budget process; 4 indicators analyzed how effectively municipalities work in the Prozorro system; and 9 more measured how productively communities use prozorro.sale to manage assets. On Prozorro and Prozorro.Sale, the data of all contracting authorities subordinate to the city council was reviewed. It is worth noting that the list of subordinate organizers covered in this study is broader than the contracting authority hierarchies that city councils have currently configured in the BI Prozorro analytics module. Thresholds for these indicators were set based on the average result across the full sample of 11 cities. 

The assessment was conducted in March 2026. 

Research results

On average, cities met the criteria of the “Public Finance” block at 44.4%. Compared to previous studies on openness and public engagement (53.5%) and e-services (49.8%), this result is somewhat lower, although it is better than the result for the “Open Data” block (23.1%), even though finance is an area of high public interest and maximum risk. 

Dnipro had the highest score — 60 points. Lutsk followed with 57 points, then Kyiv and Khmelnytskyi with 52. The lowest scores went to Chernihiv (21 points), Poltava (24), and Kharkiv (25). 

Overall, all cities posted modest results for an area of this importance. 

Effective planning and effective use of Prozorro.Sale to manage community property helped Dnipro lead the sample. At the same time, analysts identified problems with the publication of key documents and with informing residents about their participation in the budget process — Dnipro’s website did not feature the minutes of public hearings on the draft budget or the results of consultations with business. 

A detailed review of the hearings held in Dnipro and of the city’s documents revealed regulatory inconsistencies between the Community Charter, new legislative requirements, and the approved Procedure for Holding Public Hearings on the Draft Budget. Program representatives sent recommendations to the city council. In response, the mayor confirmed that an updated version of the Community Charter is in development.

Lutsk, in turn, populated its budget and procurement sections well — taking first place in this dimension together with Khmelnytskyi. Despite its strong scores for thematic section content, Lutsk earned far fewer points on planning effectiveness and management of municipal property, which is consistent with the conclusions of the State Audit Service of Ukraine, which identified significant financial violations. 

Kyiv failed 11 of the 17 indicators related to the budget section, restricting residents’ right of access to important information. The capital, however, met the largest number of criteria based on data from Open Budget, Prozorro, and Prozorro.Sale. 

Chernihiv, Poltava, and Kharkiv did not provide structured budget sections on their official websites, which significantly affected their scores and rankings. 

Cities performed best on the following criteria: 

• Using Prozorro.Sale for municipal property leasing auctions and configuring the contracting authority hierarchy for BI Prozorro (all 11 cities) 
• Holding small-scale privatization procedures through Prozorro.Sale and providing a dedicated section on public procurement on the website (9 cities each) 
• Publishing the decision on the 2026 budget in the thematic section, using Prozorro.Sale for land auctions, executing general fund revenues within the sample’s average, and creating a dedicated section on the local budget (8 cities each met these indicators).

Cities performed worst on: 

• Publishing the list of public proposals to the draft budget and publishing reports on budget program passports on the Open Budget portal (no city met these criteria) 
• Publishing minutes of public hearings on the draft budget and the results of consultations with business on procurement (10 cities each) 
• Publishing the Local Debt Management Program for 2026, posting a link to the territorial community profile on the Open Budget portal or to the Spending portal next to the list of main spending administrators, and posting budget program passports on the Open Budget portal (9 cities each).

Availability of financial information

Cities met the 20 criteria for publishing key budget and procurement information at an average rate of 43.3%.

Lutsk and Khmelnytskyi did the best on accessibility, scoring 30 of 46 possible points each. The lowest scores went to Chernihiv and Kharkiv (5 points each) and Poltava, with only 2 points. 

All available reference information on a given topic — for example, the community budget or public procurement — should be conveniently gathered in one place. Structuring information on local government communication channels around the “single point of entry” principle helps residents find the data they need easily. If decisions, minutes, and instructions are hard to track down even for analysts, ordinary citizens have even less chance of exercising their right of access. 

8 of 11 cities created a proper budget section. The Poltava city council website has no budget section at all. In Kharkiv and Chernihiv, the relevant sections consist of numerous pages with lists of links to documents, which makes navigation very difficult for users. Kharkiv has 73 such pages. The absence or unstructured nature of the budget sections is what produced the low scores for these three cities — analysts did not check the other indicators related to section content for them. 

The content of thematic sections on local budgets was assessed against 17 indicators. Cities handled document publication very differently. Only three municipalities published the budget regulations: Zaporizhzhia, Kropyvnytskyi, and Khmelnytskyi. The documents of these cities establish residents’ right to take part in budget planning. A link to the decision on the 2026 budget was found in 8 of 11 cities — that is, in all of those that had created a separate budget section. At the same time, only Kyiv, Odesa, and Khmelnytskyi published the consolidated current version of the 2025 budget reflecting all the changes made during the year. 

More than half of the cities (7 of 11) published lists of main spending administrators and reports on the execution of the territorial community budget for the three-, six-, and nine-month periods of 2025. Among the cities with a budget section, Khmelnytskyi did not post quarterly reports, and Lviv did not post the list of spending administrators.

Communicating the results of public engagement in the budget process turned out to be the most problematic area. Information on public hearings on the draft budget is scattered across various website pages and social media. The Euroindex methodology, by contrast, requires data to be published on the “single point of entry” principle — on a single page or in a single section where the user can easily find it. By that standard, only Khmelnytskyi posted hearing minutes in the proper place. The other 10 municipalities did not add minutes to their thematic section, although announcements of hearings were found in 5 cities. 

No city published a full list of proposals received from residents during hearings or through other forms of engagement in its budget section. Municipalities offered different ways to engage: in Lviv, for example, residents were encouraged to send proposals by email, but the results of that collection, together with the proposals from the budget hearings, are not reflected in the thematic section. Publishing such lists, especially with a record of how proposals were considered, is critical. It demonstrates to residents that their engagement was not a formality, and lets them understand the authorities’ reasoning: why some proposals were accepted and others were rejected.

Analysts also paid attention to whether links to state information portals were placed in the budget sections. Lutsk and Kropyvnytskyi added a link to the Open Budget public web portal. Odesa and Zaporizhzhia adopted the best practice and posted a link to the Spending portal (the Unified Web Portal for the Use of Public Funds) next to the list of main spending administrators. This makes searching the Spending portal convenient using the registration code of the relevant administrator. 

A unified procurement section was missing in Odesa and Poltava. In Odesa, procurement information is split across the pages of structural divisions. In Poltava, no such section was created at all on the new version of the website. 

In addition to checking for a “procurement entry point,” analysts looked for results of 2025 consultations with business — either on specific tenders or on the community’s procurement policy in general. Only Khmelnytskyi placed such information in the proper location; the other 10 cities did not inform the public about their cooperation with local business on procurement. 

Finally, in the procurement dimension, municipalities performed best on the BI Prozorro analytical tool. All 11 cities successfully configured a hierarchy of contracting authorities in the analytics module — an important step toward professional procurement monitoring. In the current study, experts credited the presence of a hierarchy regardless of when it was last updated. In future waves, however, data must be current for the reporting period for the indicator to count. Kharkiv exemplifies this practice, having updated its hierarchy in August 2025. 

Indicators of quality and efficiency in community financial management 

Automated data collection allowed analysts to study the quality and efficiency of budget planning in communities. Indicators from the Open Budget portal covered execution of the revenue and expenditure sides of local budgets for 2025, the ability of city councils to ensure receipts from local taxes and fees, optimization of spending on the management apparatus, and publication of budget program passports and execution reports. Cities could earn up to 22 points for these seven criteria. 

First and foremost, analysts checked planning accuracy: how closely actual revenues and expenditures matched the revised annual plans for 2025, based on Open Budget data for the full year. Across the sample of 11 cities, the average deviation in the module was 3.08% on the revenue side and 6.58% on the expenditure side. These values served as the threshold: a city scored positively if its deviation did not exceed the sample average. 

Both under-execution and over-execution of the plan reduce budget predictability. If actual figures differ substantially from the plan — in either direction — this can signal that the budget was drafted without sufficient justification. At the same time, the program takes into account that under full-scale war, planning accuracy depends substantially on external factors. For this reason, the assessment looked not at absolute plan execution but at deviation relative to the sample average — that is, how a city handles planning compared with other municipalities operating in a range of conditions, from rear-area cities to frontline ones. 

Overall, the results show that the cities under review handled budget planning at a respectable level — especially given full-scale war. Some communities designated as territories of potential hostilities posted results on a par with rear-area cities. 

According to Open Budget data, 10 of the cities under review under-executed their expenditure plans in 2025: they expected to spend more than they actually did. Khmelnytskyi spent almost exactly what it planned — overshooting by just 0.4%. On the revenue side, Zaporizhzhia, Kropyvnytskyi, Lutsk, Odesa, Poltava, and Khmelnytskyi exceeded projected receipts. 

Kharkiv showed the lowest budget planning accuracy: the city under-executed its budget plan by more than 14% on both revenues and expenditures. According to the report on the execution of the Kharkiv territorial municipal budget for 2025, the main reason was the non-receipt of a state budget subvention for the extension of the third metro line, in the amount of UAH 2,090.1 million. This is important context: Kharkiv’s deviation is largely driven by external factors.

Analysts also examined the budget balance of each municipality — the difference between actual revenues and expenditures. Based on 2025 results, only Poltava ended the year with a surplus (actual revenues exceeded expenditures) and met the corresponding indicator. The other 10 cities in the sample closed the reporting period with a deficit.

All cities under review performed worst on publishing budget program passports and execution reports on the Open Budget portal. Main spending administrators in Kyiv, Kropyvnytskyi, Poltava, Kharkiv, and Khmelnytskyi did not publish a single document. Analysts credited only Lviv and Odesa with passport availability, since both posted documents from city council departments implementing policy in the five priority areas — finance, healthcare, education, social policy, and housing and utilities.

The reporting indicator was not met by any city. Reports on budget program passports of individual administrators were published on the Open Budget portal in Dnipro, Lutsk, Lviv, and Odesa, but no city had reports on passports for at least the five priority areas.

Working with Prozorro and Prozorro.Sale

To assess how comprehensively and effectively local self-government bodies handle procurement and the management of municipal property, analysts drew on data from two electronic systems: Prozorro, where communities procure goods and services with budget funds, and Prozorro.Sale, where cities, conversely, generate revenue through privatization, leasing of municipal property, and land auctions.

To gauge the quality of city councils’ procurement work, analysts focused first on the Contracting Authority Index across all recipients and administrators of budget funds of the local self-government bodies for 2025. The Contracting Authority Index is a composite indicator developed by the DOZORRO project of Transparency International Ukraine. A high Index reflects greater performance, openness, competition, and fewer violations in procurement. The average Contracting Authority Index for 2025 across the 11 cities was 36.4. Kyiv had the highest score (40.1) and Lviv the lowest (32.2). At the same time, a city’s Contracting Authority Index reflects the aggregate performance of various subordinate organizers. To understand the reasons behind specific results, the practices of individual divisions and institutions need to be analyzed. 

The criterion that captures procurement competition — the average number of bidders — was close in this sample to the national average. On average, the 11 cities attracted 1.86 bidders per procurement in 2025 (against a national average of 1.9). The share of competitive procedures with two or more bidders averaged 35.98%. 

A separate point concerns the ability of city councils and their subordinate institutions to attract unique bidders to their procurement. In 2025, the average across the sample was 4,529 unique bidders. Kyiv predictably topped the list with 12,708 unique bidders, reflecting the much higher concentration of business in the capital. The fewest bidders were attracted in Kropyvnytskyi (2,131). Because of differences in market size, the criteria on competition and unique bidders carried relatively little weight in a city’s final score. 

To assess the effectiveness of community asset management, analysts checked whether cities used Prozorro.Sale for three types of procedures: privatization, leasing of municipal property, and land auctions. How actively the platform is used reflects local authorities’ ability to manage community assets effectively. Most cities under review have integrated the platform into their work: all 11 municipalities used Prozorro.Sale in 2025 for auctions on the lease of municipal property. Kropyvnytskyi and Chernihiv recorded no small-scale privatization procedures, however, and besides those two cities, Poltava also held no land auctions through the electronic system.

Analysts also assessed the level of competition and the share of successful auctions as indicators of the market appeal of municipal assets and of how well lots are prepared. Above-average competition (by number of bids) on small-scale privatization was shown by Dnipro, Kyiv, and Lviv, and on the lease of municipal property by Kyiv, Lviv, and Kharkiv. Overall, leasing was the most active segment: on average, cities held more than 140 auctions and attracted more than 180 bids. By comparison, small-scale privatization and land auctions averaged fewer than 30 procedures and up to 50 bids.

The lowest competition — the smallest number of bids per auction — was recorded in Zaporizhzhia and Khmelnytskyi (privatization), Kropyvnytskyi and Lutsk (leasing), and Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv, and Kharkiv (land auctions). Even given the objective security risks faced by frontline cities, the level of competition at auctions depends primarily on how proactively city councils prepare and promote lots.

In the end, only Dnipro managed to deliver above-average success rates across all three auction types. This is one of the reasons for Dnipro’s leadership in this study. Organizers in Poltava, Kyiv, and Kharkiv met this indicator on municipal property (privatization and leasing), but could not match those results on land auctions. Only Dnipro, Lutsk, and Khmelnytskyi achieved a high share of successful procedures in land management, while for the rest, this remained the most difficult area.

In April, the State Audit Service of Ukraine confirmed to Transparency International Ukraine that the state financial audit of the Lutsk territorial community budget for 2020–2025 had identified financial violations resulting in significant losses. The audit covered the city council’s executive bodies and a number of municipal enterprises, including in construction, housing and utilities, education, social policy, and healthcare.

Lutsk earned solid marks for information availability, but the financial violations identified by auditors for 2020–2025 show that even open information does not guarantee the effective use of funds. On indicators of efficiency in managing community finances and assets, Lutsk scored significantly worse. 

In particular, the Capital Construction Department of the Lutsk city council, where the State Audit Service of Ukraine identified the key episodes of financial irregularities, showed a very low level of competition in procurement and did not publish any documents on the Open Budget portal. 

That is precisely why openness is necessary but not sufficient. It creates the conditions for oversight, but public and institutional scrutiny remain indispensable. Citizens need to be engaged in shaping budget decisions — both at the formation stage and in monitoring how funds are spent — to prevent abuses of this kind.

Key findings and recommendations 

The average performance on the “Public Finance” block is mediocre — 44.4%. No city scored more than 60 points, and none combined sufficient transparency with efficient management of community resources. There is no example of a comprehensive approach: city councils did not show strong results across the key dimensions — from information availability and budget planning accuracy to effective procurement and asset management. 

The leaders of the block earned their positions on the strength of a single dimension. Dnipro and Kyiv scored well on budget planning accuracy (per Open Budget data) and active use of Prozorro.Sale, but did not provide adequate public access to key documents. Lutsk and Khmelnytskyi, by contrast, populated their budget sections well but trailed badly on the rest of the criteria.

All cities supplied contracting authority hierarchies for the BI Prozorro analytical resource and used Prozorro.Sale for municipal property leasing auctions. 9 of 11 municipalities also held small-scale privatization procedures on Prozorro.Sale and created a dedicated thematic section on public procurement. 

Yet no city published, in a dedicated budget section, the list of public proposals to the draft 2026 budget, and none ensured the publication of execution reports on budget program passports on the Open Budget portal. 10 of 11 cities did not publish minutes of public hearings on the draft budget or the results of consultations with business on procurement, and they failed to deliver a budget surplus in 2025.

The study shows: local authorities mostly publish the key documents on the budget process, but handle communication on public engagement poorly. This applies to consultations with business on improving procurement, public hearings on the draft budget for the next year, and the processing of resident proposals collected through various channels. Even among the leaders (Dnipro), this is one of the most serious problems. Budget openness is defined by the quality of dialogue with the community: the inclusion of different social groups, the creation of platforms for exchanging views and proposals, and the communication of results. 

At the same time, despite wartime challenges, large Ukrainian municipalities maintain basic governability and budget discipline. The performance of the cities under review is in line with widely recognized European standards. In particular, revenue planning accuracy in most municipalities deserves the highest “A” rating under the international PEFA methodology (criterion: execution at 97–106%). The average deviation of actual revenues from plan was just 3.08%. Although the overall execution range runs from 85.3% (driven by Kharkiv’s result, given the unprecedented wartime challenges it faces) to 104.8%, most of the cities analyzed comfortably meet the international benchmark.

The findings also show that proximity to the front is not a decisive factor in resource management performance. Cities with similar security conditions deliver different results. For example, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia, both on the List of Territories of Potential Hostilities, met significantly more procurement and asset criteria than Chernihiv, which faces constant security challenges as well. A correlation analysis confirmed that the security factor (status as a territory of potential hostilities) does not affect procurement and asset management results. 

The program recommends that all cities (not only those in the pilot sample) take the analytical findings into account, namely: 

In the budget process:

• Create or expand a single thematic section on the official website devoted to the local budget. Ensure that the information in this section is structured and includes at least: 

1. The council’s budget regulations (if there are none, consider drafting and approving such a document to organize a transparent budget process)
2. The decisions approving the budget for the current and previous years, with all amendments made during the year reflected in a single document 
3. Documents on budget planning for the current and coming years: the budget forecast, budget requests of main spending administrators, and so on
4. Documents on local debt management, such as the Local Debt Management Program
5. The list of main spending administrators with their USREOU codes and an indication of the data’s currency 
6. Links to relevant resources: the territorial community profile on the Open Budget public web portal and the Spending portal (the Unified Web Portal for the Use of Public Funds). The latter link is best placed next to the list of main spending administrators. 
7. The full cycle of information on public engagement in the budget process.
   

• Proactively engage the public in budget planning, in particular by holding public hearings on the draft budget for the next year and by collecting proposals electronically. Process all proposals received and communicate the results in a structured way in the thematic section on the official website. It is important to publish lists of public proposals on the draft local budget for the next year, including proposals received during public hearings and through other forms of soliciting public input. 
• Consider engaging subject-matter experts to refine approaches to short- and medium-term budget planning. Exchanging experience with other cities may also be useful for establishing best practices in budget planning under full-scale war. We also note that effective management of budget funds requires proper internal control — in particular, internal audits using a risk-based approach. 
• Main spending administrators should publish budget program passports and execution reports within the established deadlines — passports within three working days of approval, and reports within three working days of submission of annual budget reporting — in open data format, that is, on the Unified State Open Data Web Portal (data.gov.ua) and on their own websites.Publishing passports and reports on the Open Budget public web portal is a best practice and helps make these documents available to a wide range of citizens and experts. 

In public procurement: 

• Create or expand a single thematic section on the official website devoted to public procurement. Ensure that information in this section is structured and includes, where applicable: 

1. Documents regulating procurement in the community, for example, a Procurement Policy (if one has been drafted), justifications of the technical and quality characteristics of procurement subjects (under CMU Resolution No. 710), and others 
2. Announcements of pre-tender consultations or discussions with business and information on the results of these consultations. 

• To raise the Contracting Authority Index and improve results on other procurement criteria, attention should be paid to the quality of procurement by subordinate organizers across four groups of indicators:

1. Performance: If the share of successful procurement by a given organizer is low, or there are many canceled procedures, it may be worth revisiting approaches and policies for pre-tender work and market analysis. This may signal that tender documentation is insufficiently developed and that technical requirements do not match the offers available on the market. 
2. Competition: A small number of bidders indicates that the organizer’s procurement is not sufficiently attractive to the market. The problem may lie in insufficient awareness among potential bidders of upcoming procurement, short timelines for clarifications and bid submission, or unclear descriptions of the procurement subject, payment terms, and so on.
3. Openness: This indicator is affected by lots that were disqualified or that drew many questions or demands. Tenders with disqualifications or numerous questions need to be identified and analyzed for their causes. It is also worth checking whether bidders need more detailed instructions or clarifications of the stated requirements.
4. Rule compliance: Following the law in procurement is essential to minimize the number of confirmed violations identified by State Audit Service monitoring and complaints upheld by the AMCU. A high number of recorded violations negatively affects market trust in the organizer’s procurement and all of the preceding indicators. 

These indicators for a city’s organizers can be reviewed directly in the Contracting Authority Index tool. More detailed descriptions of each indicator and recommendations for improving them are available at the link. To improve procurement, more active engagement with the market is also needed — through consultations and discussions with businesses.

• To analyze the work of divisions, enterprises, institutions, and organizations subordinate to the city council on your own, build and update a contracting authority hierarchy in the BI Prozorro analytics module. This will let you review detailed indicators across the entire hierarchy and for each individual organizer in one place and identify problems in time. The result is improved procurement quality both for individual organizers and for the community as a whole. We also recommend adding the hierarchy of contracting authorities subordinate to the city council to the dedicated thematic section on public procurement.

! Note that in subsequent waves, currency of the hierarchy as of the assessment year will be a mandatory condition for the indicator to count. For a positive score in the next study, hierarchies must be updated by September 2026 at the latest. The guide is available at the link. 

In asset management: 

• Use the Handbook for Local Self-Government Bodies prepared by the Prozorro.Sale team to optimize privatization, leasing, and land auctions. 
• Analyze the level of competition at auctions of different types: privatization or leasing of municipal property and land plots. The ability to attract more bids depends largely on the quality of lot preparation and on how auctions are publicized. To improve these elements, the place to start is updating and publishing information on property available for privatization or lease. This can encourage potential buyers and tenants to initiate auctions. The next steps are to prepare detailed descriptions of objects with photos and realistic starting prices, and to publicize auctions more actively on city council websites and other platforms. 
• Step up and improve work with land auctions. Land auctions can be an important source of revenue for the local budget, so the existing List of Land Plots Subject to Lease or Privatization should be reviewed and auctions held through the electronic system, following detailed recommendations.

Budget transparency is more than access to information. It is also the real ability of residents to influence decisions and to understand how public money works for the community’s development. It builds trust, but more than that, it shapes the quality of the management decisions that affect the life of cities today and in the future.

In wartime, when resources are limited and needs are growing, every budget decision carries a higher cost. That is why openness, accountability, and citizen engagement are no longer add-ons, but baseline conditions for resilience and recovery.

Ultimately, the key question is whether cities are ready to build systems in which transparency is the norm — the norm that will define the quality of life in Ukrainian communities in the years to come.

The program will prepare tailored recommendations for each city council covered by the study, to serve as roadmaps for improving the practical operation of electronic services. The indicator-by-indicator results for each city are available at the link.

For cities not included in the pilot study, the program team has prepared a self-assessment form to gauge alignment of the sphere with European standards.

This research is made possible with the support of the MATRA Programme of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine, and with the financial support of Sweden within the framework of the program on institutional development of Transparency International Ukraine.

Content reflects the views of the authors and does not necessarily correspond with the position of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine or the Government of Sweden.

Research results

The average level of implementation of 40 indicators in the “Open Data” block is 23.1%. 

Kyiv achieved the highest score, with 44.3 out of 100 possible points. One position below is Lutsk with 40 points, followed by Kropyvnytskyi and Lviv, each with 35.3 points. The lowest scores were recorded by Odesa (0), Poltava (0), and Chernihiv (9.9).

Kyiv owes its leading position to two factors. First, in 2024, the city authorities approved a key regulatory document that incorporated the Ministry of Digital Transformation’s updated recommendations and began systematically populating the Kyiv City State Administration’s account on data.gov.ua in line with those recommendations. Second, unlike Lutsk, Kropyvnytskyi, Lviv, and Dnipro, Kyiv currently publishes its datasets exclusively on the Unified State Open Data Web Portal, so data transfer (harvesting) issues on data.gov.ua did not affect the city’s results. 

As for the cities ranked immediately behind Kyiv, Lutsk, Lviv, and Dnipro outperformed the capital in the block of indicators related to open data policy. The critical issue for them, as well as for Kropyvnytskyi, was that the Ministry of Digital Transformation had not established monthly automated transfer of data from local open data portals to the national portal. 

The analysts extracted data for the analysis from data.gov.ua on December 5, 2025. As later confirmed in the Ministry’s response to an inquiry from the Transparent Cities program, data transfer from the open data portals of Kropyvnytskyi and Lutsk City Councils was carried out on September 10, 2025; from Lviv City Council, on September 15, 2025; and from Dnipro City Council, on October 28, 2025. As a result, in each of these cities, more than 10 “EU integration” datasets with monthly or weekly update frequency had no chance of passing the verification filter for timely updated resources. 

In two regional centers — Odesa and Poltava — which scored zero points in the study, the same key problems were identified: these cities have no dedicated thematic section on their official websites consolidating key open data information, and as of December 5, 2025, the electronic accounts of Odesa City Council and Poltava City Council on data.gov.ua were empty. That said, the operating context of these two cities is very different.

The official website of Odesa City Council is designed so that the number of “Open Data” pages equals the number of local authority structural units. This design approach does not comply with contemporary European approaches to user-centricity and the creation of one-stop shops/single points of contact. Odesa’s results are also driven by the absence of approved key open data policy documents and the lack of centralized oversight over dataset publication.

In Poltava, the context is entirely different. In December 2024, the city council approved the Procedure for Publishing Datasets of Poltava City Council and Its Executive Bodies in Open Data Format. There is also a dedicated website, “Open Data of Poltava City Council,” where up-to-date datasets can be found. However, the municipality did not take the next steps—it did not consolidate all user-relevant information about this area in one place on the official website, and it does not comply with the state requirement to ensure convenient and clear dataset publication on data.gov.ua under the “single window” principle.

Local self-government policy in the open data

The average level of implementation across the 10 indicators related to local open data policies is 48.8%. The highest result was recorded by Lutsk, with 20 out of 22 points.

The study results showed that 8 of 11 cities have a “single entry point” to open data on their official websites. Only the municipalities of Odesa, Poltava, and Kharkiv failed to provide convenient public access to a section with the relevant information.

7 of 11 city councils published, in that section, links to an administrative act that approved, within the last five years, a unified List of Datasets subject to publication in open data format. The most recent was the order of the Lutsk mayor dated February 26, 2025. All seven documents assign responsibility for each dataset to specific information managers (executive bodies, municipal enterprises, and institutions).

9 of 11 cities paid insufficient attention to the purpose for which data are published—namely, services built on that data. Journalists and researchers can, where needed, download files in CSV/JSON/XML formats, analyze them, and draw appropriate conclusions. But the main purpose of publishing local self-government datasets is to ensure the data are continuously used, including for designing convenient tools for residents (maps, chatbots, mobile applications, etc.). Only the municipalities of Lutsk and Lviv provided links, in their respective sections, to e-services built on their datasets.

As of December, 8 city councils had not published links to decisions on accession to the International Open Data Charter. Some had genuinely not joined it, while Zaporizhzhia, Kropyvnytskyi, and Khmelnytskyi did not provide information on their accession.

In addition, 8 cities do not include, in their approved local self-government List of Datasets, information on the format in which each specific dataset is published. Lack of alignment on this issue at the level of a key policy document leads to recurring problems for information managers during dataset moderation on data.gov.ua, with non-existent formats such as excel, API, and others appearing in resource descriptions. It also makes it easier for municipalities to change publication formats from time to time without considering the problems this creates for regular users.

Open data publication

The average level of implementation across the 30 indicators related to publication of “EU integration” datasets in 9 cities (excluding Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv) is 15.9%. The highest result was recorded by Kyiv, with 27.3 out of 78 points.

First, the analysts checked whether the required datasets were present. The study found that, of the 270 “EU integration” datasets that city councils were expected to publish in their single electronic accounts on data.gov.ua, 148 (55%) had been published as of December 5, 2025. As for the rest, 112 datasets could not be found at all; in 5 cases, there was no single consolidated city-level dataset; and in another 5 cases, datasets had been formally created but the data were inaccessible. 

The largest numbers of “EU integration” datasets were published by Kropyvnytskyi and Lutsk (28 each), followed by Lviv (26). The accounts of Odesa and Poltava City Councils were empty, while the Chernihiv City Council account contained only 2 datasets.

A positive result was that 7 of 9 cities published the dataset “Roll-call results of voting of local council members at plenary sessions of the local self-government body.” The weakest-performing datasets were “Data on the location of electric vehicle charging stations” (published only by Lutsk) and “Data on operational characteristics of buildings of municipal enterprises, institutions, and organizations where energy management systems have been implemented” (available only in Kropyvnytskyi and Lutsk).

At the second step, analysts checked whether the update frequency specified in the files of existing datasets corresponded to the Ministry of Digital Transformation’s recommendations. Matches were recorded in 70 cases, while 97 cases showed mismatches. In one case, analysts had to record partial correspondence, because for the dataset “Lists of legal regulations,” the Kyiv City State Administration specified the recommended update frequency (monthly), whereas Kyiv City Council indicated its own frequency (annually).

The highest number of matches was recorded in Kropyvnytskyi (21 of 28 datasets), while the highest number of mismatches was recorded in Lviv (20 of 26 datasets). In 11 cases, Lviv specified an update frequency not provided for at all in the Ministry’s recommendations—“immediately after changes are made.” In subsequent analysis, timely updates for these datasets were assessed against the Ministry’s recommended frequency. In 4 cases, Khmelnytskyi indicated that the dataset “is no longer updated.”

After that, program experts analyzed whether city councils complied with the timeliness principle. For each of the 144 datasets, they checked whether the datasets contained resources updated on time in accordance with the dataset file. It turned out that only 42 datasets had timely updated resources, while 93 did not. In 9 cases, this check was not performed because the data update frequency was “more than once a day.”

It was at this stage that Kyiv moved into first place. It had 12 timely updated datasets out of 20. Kropyvnytskyi and Lutsk each had 9 out of 28, and Lviv had 7 out of 26. 

A major stumbling block was datasets that were supposed to be updated monthly. Of 68 such datasets, 52 belonged to cities that publish data on their own local open data portals (Dnipro, Kropyvnytskyi, Lutsk, and Lviv), after which harvesting to data.gov.ua should occur. The analysis showed that only 2 of these 52 datasets contained timely updated resources: Kropyvnytskyi’s dataset with API endpoints for obtaining data from the e-Liky system, and Dnipro’s dataset “Lists of legal regulations,” whose resources were likely added manually to data.gov.ua rather than transferred via harvesting. By contrast, another monthly Dnipro dataset—“Action plan for drafting legal regulations”—was updated on the local open data portal on November 18, 2025, but on December 5, 2025 it was not counted among timely updated datasets on data.gov.ua because the Ministry had last harvested data on October 28, 2025.

Study leaders: availability on data.gov.ua of timely updated datasets with monthly update frequency as of December 05, 2025.

Accordingly, there are solid grounds to conclude that Kyiv’s rise to first place was driven by the fact that, unlike its main competitors, the capital does not depend on transferring data from its own open data portal to data.gov.ua.

The next four steps aimed to verify whether city councils comply, when publishing data, with one of the most important principles—the principle of interoperability. This principle requires “ensuring interaction, combinability, and compatibility of public information in open data format, including through the use in each dataset of unified identifiers of objects, other object attributes, a unified dataset structure, and unified data resource structures, which makes it possible to compare information within a dataset or resource, as well as with other datasets of the same information manager or other information managers.” 

At the fourth stage, program experts analyzed whether timely updated resources fully reflect the dataset structure prescribed by the Ministry of Digital Transformation’s recommendations. This check was meaningful only for datasets that should consist of two or more resources. For example, the dataset “Data on e-petitions” should consist of two resources: petitions (petition data) and votings (data on persons who signed the petition). As a result of checking 15 datasets with timely updated resources, it was found that the structure of only 3 fully complied with the Ministry’s recommendations, 9 partially complied, and 3 did not comply at all.

Next, for each of the 42 timely updated datasets and 9 datasets with an update frequency of “more than once a day,” experts checked whether resource names followed the Ministry’s recommendations. In 18 cases, the recommendations were fully followed; in 12, partially followed; and in 21 cases, not followed at all. It was at this stage that Lutsk finally lost its chance to compete with Kyiv for leadership. It turned out that all Lutsk resources were titled in Ukrainian, whereas English-language names are required.

At the sixth stage, for each of the 42 datasets, analysts checked whether file names of timely uploaded resources followed the Ministry’s recommendations. In 17 cases, the recommendations were fully followed; in another 10, partially followed. If the previous step showed that the Kyiv City State Administration and Kyiv City Council used different languages for resource names (English and Ukrainian, respectively), then at this stage the divergence shifted to Latin-script conventions (for example, where KCSA uploads a file named projects_2025-12-02.csv, Kyiv City Council uses plan-diialnosti-z-pidgotovki-proiektiv-reguliatornikh-aktiv_2025-rik.xlsx), which is why the city’s overall result was assessed as partial implementation. 

Finally, at the last step, for each of the 42 timely updated datasets and 9 datasets with an update frequency of “more than once a day,” experts checked whether the structure of timely updated resources included all attributes (fields) specified in the Ministry’s recommendations. It was found that 15 datasets had resources built exactly in line with the recommendations. These included 5 of Kyiv’s 19 datasets and 5 of Lutsk’s 9 datasets. In 8 cases, partial implementation was recorded. The attributes of resources forming 28 datasets differed from those recommended. 

As a result, out of the 270 datasets reviewed by the program’s analysts, only 6 (2.2%) are published on time and in line with all recommendations of the Ministry of Digital Transformation. These are 4 datasets from Kyiv, 1 from Dnipro, and 1 from Lviv.

Key findings and recommendations 

The average level of implementation by 11 cities of indicators in the “Open data” block (23.1%) was substantially lower than the average levels in other Euro Index blocks—“Openness and public engagement” (53.5%) and “E-services” (49.8%). At the same time, the component related to local open data policy (48.8%) is implemented three times better than the component related to dataset publication (15.9%). Alongside municipalities, responsibility for this result also lies with the Ministry of Digital Transformation and Diia State Enterprise, which is within the Ministry’s management scope, because development of methodological recommendations, timely dataset moderation, and regular harvesting from local portals fall within their competence.

The “single entry point” principle, which is an element of European governance, is actively applied by regional centers when it comes to open data policy. In a dedicated thematic section on the official website, most municipalities provide links to the Regulation/Procedure governing key aspects of local self-government work with open data, as well as to the List of Datasets subject to publication in open data format. In most cases, this List assigns responsibility for specific datasets to structural units and specifies the update frequency for each dataset. Many city councils also provide a link to their single electronic account on the Unified State Open Data Web Portal.

At the same time, there are problems with defining the formats in which local self-government data should be published. Few municipalities provide access to the document appointing the person(s) responsible for open data publication. But the biggest problem is the near-total absence of evidence that municipalities initiate or at least track the use of their data for building e-services capable of improving citizens’ lives. 

As for open data publication, since 2022 the datasets of Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv have been removed by the state from public access, and among cities that do publish data there are still regional centers that have not switched to publication under the “single window” principle in the city council’s electronic account on data.gov.ua. 

Of the 270 “EU integration” datasets that analysts searched for in 9 electronic accounts, 148 (55%) had been published as of December 5, 2025. Of these, only 51 datasets had timely updated resources. This result is largely due to the fact that Dnipro, Kropyvnytskyi, Lutsk, and Lviv city councils—leaders by number of published datasets—use their own open data portals, while the Ministry of Digital Transformation is unable to ensure regular monthly transfer of data from these portals to data.gov.ua.

Publication of timely updated datasets very rarely follows the interoperability principle. Analysis of timely updated datasets showed that only 6 of 51 datasets complied with all Ministry recommendations on unified object identifiers, unified dataset structures, and unified data resource structures.

The findings indicate a gap between indicators formed on the basis of local self-government self-assessment or aggregated national indicators, and the actual situation with open data publication and quality at the local level. 

In particular, in the Digital Transformation Index of Ukraine’s territorial communities, Kharkiv reported publication of 100% of open datasets, Dnipro 99%, and Khmelnytskyi 90%; however, the verification conducted within this study did not confirm these figures. Similarly, Ukraine’s high position in the Open Data Maturity 2025 ranking (4th place, open data maturity level 97.1% compared with a European average of 81.1%) more likely reflects the existence of policies and initiatives at the national level than the real implementation of EU open data requirements in municipal practice.

Data from the Digital Transformation Index of Ukraine’s territorial communities on open data, as of January 11, 2026.

The program recommends that all cities (not only those included in the pilot sample) take into account the analytical findings, specifically: 

• In line with the updated Resolution No. 835, approve a new internal administrative document containing the List of Datasets subject to publication in open data format. Taking into account the Ministry of Digital Transformation’s recommendations, specify for each dataset in the List: 

1. responsibility of specific information managers for preparation;
2. responsibility of specific information managers for publication;
3. update frequency (do not use the option “immediately after changes are made”);
4. format (do not use labels that are not formats—excel, API, etc.).

• Create a dedicated open data section on the official city council website. In that section, provide links to: 

1.  the document approving the Regulation/Procedure on open data;
2. the document approving the current List of Datasets subject to publication in open data format; 
3. document(s) designating the person(s) responsible for open data publication; 
4.  the decision on accession to the International Open Data Charter (if applicable);
5. the city council’s single electronic account on the Unified State Open Data Web Portal.

•  Compile information on services built on local self-government open data (maps, dashboards, chatbots, mobile apps) and provide links to these services in the dedicated open data section.

To ensure proper dataset publication on data.gov.ua, convenient access, and the ability to compare information both within a single dataset and across analogous datasets of other information managers, we recommend:

• Publish open datasets exclusively through the city council’s electronic account on data.gov.ua.
• Apply the practice of creating one city council dataset for each dataset established by Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 835, in line with European user-centric approaches.
• Check whether dataset titles in the city council account match the titles set out in Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 835.
• Conduct a detailed review of the Ministry of Digital Transformation’s dataset publication recommendations.

• Check whether the update frequency for each dataset, as specified in its file on data.gov.ua, matches the frequency in the approved List of Datasets.

• Prepare the number of resources recommended for each dataset. Resource structures (table fields) must fully match the recommended structures (see the table templates on the recommendation pages). Column names must be in English and fully replicate those proposed by the Ministry. There is no need to duplicate column names in Ukrainian. Abbreviating column names is unacceptable. 
• Provide accurate and complete information in resources. If some data needed to fill cells are missing, the cells must be populated with null.
• Name resource files and resources themselves using the names recommended by the Ministry (e.g., regulatoryList_2026-06-01, titleList_2026-09-30).
• Publish resources only in the formats provided for in the approved List of Datasets (CSV/JSON/XML/GeoJSON). If resources are published in CSV format, use UTF-8 encoding with comma delimiters.
• Verify that each dataset page contains the number of resources recommended by the Ministry. 
• Update resources forming datasets by version updates (see Example 1 and Example 2 of correct updates for datasets containing two resources each). 

Since the Ministry of Digital Transformation is the lead body in the system of central executive authorities responsible for shaping and implementing state policy in open data, is the holder of the data.gov.ua portal, and supervises the portal administrator, the program recommends that the Ministry: 

• Restore public access to those datasets of information holders from Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson regions whose publication does not pose a threat to national security, territorial integrity, or public order.
• Align, with the Ministry for Communities and Territories Development and the State Enterprise Administrator of the Urban Cadastre at the National Level, a unified position on access to municipal urban planning documentation during martial law, and publish it.
• Approve a three-year Open Data Development Strategy for Ukraine.
• Enshrine the “single window” principle in new versions of Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 835 or Resolution No. 867.
• Disseminate methodological guidance for information managers on transition to dataset publication under this principle. Pay particular attention to cases where, prior to applying the principle, multiple information managers within one council published identically named datasets either by exporting in open, machine-readable formats or by each providing their own API endpoint.
• Disseminate methodological guidance on resource updates via version updates. 
• Disseminate methodological guidance on conducting an information audit. 
• Clarify or remove inconsistencies in existing recommendations for open dataset publication, including: 

1. lists of legal and individual regulations (excluding internal ones), draft decisions subject to discussion, and the document designating the person(s) responsible for publishing open data; 
2. real-time data on the location of urban electric and passenger road transport;
3. register of burial record books. 

• Disseminate recommendations for the open dataset related to the unified public investment project portfolio of a territorial community, publication of which is required by Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 527.
• During moderation of municipal datasets, strictly enforce the “single window” principle so that structural units of local self-government bodies have no opportunity to publish data through their own separate accounts.

Establish regular monthly automated transfer of datasets from local open data portals to data.gov.ua. In case this technical issue cannot be resolved in the long term, officially notify the relevant local self-government bodies of the actions required from them under these circumstances.

The program will prepare tailored recommendations for each city council covered by the study, to serve as roadmaps for improving the practical operation of electronic services. The indicator-by-indicator results for each city are available at the link.

For cities not included in the pilot study, the program team has prepared a self-assessment form to evaluate compliance of the sector with European standards.

This research is made possible with the support of the MATRA Programme of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine, and with the financial support of Sweden within the framework of the program on institutional development of Transparency International Ukraine. Content reflects the views of the author(s) and does not necessarily correspond with the position of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine or the Government of Sweden.

Transparency International Ukraine is an accredited representative of Global Transparency International. Since 2012, TI Ukraine has been helping Ukraine grow stronger. The organization takes a comprehensive approach to the development and implementation of changes for reduction of corruption levels in certain areas. 

TI Ukraine launched the Transparent Cities program in 2017. Its goal is to foster constructive and meaningful dialogue between citizens, local authorities, and the government to promote high-quality municipal governance, urban development, and effective reconstruction. In 2017–2022, the program annually compiled the Transparency Ranking of the 100 largest cities in Ukraine. After the full-scale invasion, the program conducted two adapted assessments on the state of municipal transparency during wartime. In 2024, the program compiled the Transparency Ranking of 100 Cities, and in 2025, it launched an updated format for assessing city councils — the European City Index.

However, none of the city councils published, on their official websites or on the websites of structural units responsible for social protection, a separate list of social services available for online ordering by citizens. While digital transformation has already taken place in the field of administrative services (lists of administrative online services can be found on the websites of Administrative Service Centers in 8 out of 11 cities), the sphere of social services has so far been largely bypassed. Notably, at the national level, specialized electronic services have been developed — the Social Portal of the Ministry of Social Policy and the Electronic Account of a Person with a Disability, which allow users to submit applications for services online. However, links to these services are published only on the websites of Kropyvnytskyi, Kharkiv, and Khmelnytskyi, primarily within news items.

Another unexpected finding of the study was the absence, on the homepages of official local self-government body websites, of links to pages dedicated to comprehensive city mobile applications with lists of available services. In total, four such applications are currently in operation: e-Dnipro (Dnipro), Kyiv Digital (Kyiv), Misto (Odesa), and Open Kharkiv (Kharkiv). However, only the homepage of the official website of the Odesa City Council contains a link to the Misto application. Even in this case, the link leads to a website where it is impossible to find clear information on which services are already available to residents and visitors of Odesa. As for the homepages of the Dnipro City Council, Kyiv City Council, Kyiv City State Administration, and Kharkiv City Council, as of October 2025 there were no references to city mobile applications at all.

Ten regional capitals do not provide access to an e-service for searching for medical equipment in municipal healthcare institutions (the only exception is Kropyvnytskyi), nor do they offer any electronic service with up-to-date data on energy management or energy monitoring (the only exception is Kyiv). Nine out of 11 cities do not provide access to an electronic service for searching for medicines purchased with public funds in municipal healthcare institutions (exceptions are Kyiv and Odesa). It should be noted that city councils are not required to collect data on medical equipment, medicine stocks, or consumption of utility services specifically for the purpose of creating electronic services based on them. Local authorities are required to disclose and in most cases, regularly do disclose such data on the Unified State Web Portal of Open Data, in accordance with Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine No. 835.

In addition to issues related to the availability of services, analysts also recorded difficulties in determining the timeliness of the data provided by certain services. For example, according to the study, 7 out of 11 city councils do not provide access to up-to-date interactive maps of civil protection shelters, which is critically important in the fourth year of the war. In Kropyvnytskyi and Poltava, it was not possible to find any links to such maps on official websites at all. In five other city councils, access to the maps was provided; however, it was impossible to verify whether the data had been updated in 2025.

As regards the application of the single point of entry principle, compliance with this indicator was recorded in only 5 out of 11 cities — Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Kropyvnytskyi, Lutsk, and Khmelnytskyi. None of the leaders — neither Kyiv, nor Lviv, nor Kharkiv — have created dedicated sections on their official websites where users could easily find up-to-date links to dozens of electronic interactive services developed by these cities on their own initiative over recent years.

Key findings and recommendations 

A clear correlation can be observed between the absence of an approved informatization program and low results in the comprehensive assessment of electronic services.

The 11 analyzed cities demonstrate very different levels of development of electronic services ecosystems. While the range of openness assessment results for this sample was 28 points, the gap between the highest and lowest scores in the second block amounted to 43 points. This disparity can be explained by the fact that, unlike indicators related to electronic services, many openness indicators are direct requirements of Ukrainian legislation, which city councils cannot ignore.

The single point of entry principle, which is an element of European governance, is applied selectively. Confusion is sometimes observed in the use of the terms services and public services. 

At the same time, clear progress can be seen in the development of digital services supporting the implementation of the Ukraine Facility Plan in the context of reforms such as Improving Preschool Education, Comprehensive Planning of Transport Sector Development, Strengthening Citizen Engagement Tools in Local Decision-Making, and Digitalisation of Public Services. Thanks to these services, residents of regional capitals have access to simple and user-friendly solutions in the areas of education, transport, administrative services, and urban amenities, as well as opportunities to participate in local e-governance.

At the same time, there are significant challenges related to digital services in the areas of local statistics, energy efficiency, healthcare, and social services. This does not contribute to the implementation of the Ukraine Facility Plan with regard to reforms outlined in the Decentralization and Regional Policy, Energy Sector, and Human Capital sections. Most importantly, local self-government bodies are not paying sufficient attention to the development of electronic services in areas whose importance continues to grow each year during wartime.

The program recommends that all cities (not only those included in the pilot sample) take into account the analytical findings, in particular by: 

• Systematizing strategic digital planning and developing and approving informatization programs for the next 3–5 years. These programs should define the purpose, priority areas, and specific objectives of digital development of the territorial community, as well as expected results. For communities, informatization programs should become not a formal document but a roadmap to a digital future. 

• Conducting an inventory of all existing digital services (information and analytical systems, mobile applications, chatbots, interactive maps, interactive dashboards, etc.), including relevant services offered by the state (e.g. Open Budget, the Social Portal of the Ministry of Social Policy), businesses (e.g. DozoR City, EasyWay), and civil society or charitable organizations (e.g. EDEM: Local Petitions, e-Liky). Links to these services should be consolidated in a single section of the official city council website — a single point of entry for electronic services. Duplication should not be avoided: for example, if municipal hospitals and clinics update data in e-Likyhttps://eliky.in.ua/, links to this service should be available both in the Electronic Services section and on the website or page of the healthcare department.

• Developing basic electronic interactive local statistics services, or, where such services already exist, regularly collecting, processing, and visualizing statistical data. Strategic planning, managerial decision-making, investment attraction, and assessment of local policy effectiveness must be data-driven. Providing access to such data does not necessarily require the immediate creation of a full-fledged local statistics portal, as done by Lviv; it may be sufficient to create a dedicated section with public thematic dashboards on the official city council website and gradually populate it, as Kyiv does. 

• Paying due attention to digital transformation in the field of social services. Over 3.5 years of the full-scale invasion, the number of recipients of social services — individuals and families belonging to vulnerable groups and/or facing difficult life circumstances — has increased significantly. Guided by European principles of human-centered and inclusive design, local authorities should extend the existing experience of digital administrative services to the social services sector as soon as possible by: 

1. ensuring access on the website of the social protection unit to online pre-booking for appointments with its departments (example: Lviv); 
2. publishing on the unit’s website a table based on the Classifier of Social Services, listing available services, service providers, and indications of whether services can be ordered online or offline;
3. creating a dedicated page explaining how to order social services online, with links to relevant national digital services (the Social Portal of the Ministry of Social Policy, the Electronic Account of a Person with a Disability, etc.); 
4. ensuring access to a web form for assessing the quality of social services provided (examples: Kyiv, Chernihiv).

• Clearly indicating the reference date of data used or displayed in electronic services (day/month/quarter/year). Data currency may be specified either through an explanatory note (e.g. “Dashboard update frequency: daily” for the Petitions dashboard on the Kyiv City State Administration website) or through a copyright notice (e.g. “© 2025 Municipal Enterprise Center for Information Technology Management” on the Zaporizhzhia shelter map). 

The program will prepare tailored recommendations for each city council covered by the study, to serve as roadmaps for improving the practical operation of electronic services. The indicator-by-indicator results for each city are available at the link.

The project is implemented by the European Union Anti-Corruption Initiative (EUACI), a leading EU-funded anti-corruption program in Ukraine, co-financed and implemented by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The opinions and views expressed by experts or organizations in this study do not necessarily reflect the position of the EUACI, the European Union, or the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.