Voting for youth projects is underway in Mykolaiv: five winners will each receive $10,000

Residents of Mykolaiv have 10 days left to vote for projects in the Youth Participatory Budget. Photo: NikVesti archive

Voting is currently underway in Mykolaiv for projects under the Youth Participatory Budget. This year, 15 youth initiatives were submitted to the competition, and the five that receive the most support from local residents will be implemented with financial backing from the international organisation Save the Children.

This was announced by Tetiana Shulichenko, Director of the Department of Economic Development at Mykolaiv City Council, in a comment to NikVesti.

Voting began on 15 June and will run until 29 June inclusive. As of 19 June, residents have 10 days left to support one of the projects.

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According to her, the Youth Participatory Budget in Mykolaiv is being implemented for the second year running. In 2026, funding will be awarded to the five winning projects, with US$10,000 earmarked for each.

«Online and offline voting began on Monday for the projects submitted by young people and shortlisted for implementation in accordance with the competition’s requirements,» said Tetiana Shulichenko.

This year, young people have proposed 15 projects across various fields — ranging from education, sport and safety to inclusion, urban regeneration and the creation of modern technological spaces using VR and AR technologies.

Among the sports projects vying for funding are the modernisation of a war-damaged sports ground, the development of rowing and the creation of new spaces for sporting activities, as well as the project «Fencing — A Path to Development». Its organisers aim to improve training conditions for young fencers and promote the development of the sport in Mykolaiv.

You can find out more about the projects at: https://budget.e-dem.ua.

Residents of the Mykolaiv City Territorial Community and registered internally displaced persons are eligible to vote.

Voting can be done online via the e-DEM platform using BankID, the ‘Diya’ app or an electronic signature.

Offline voting is also available at three locations:

• Korabelnyi District Administration (314 Bohoiavlenskyi Avenue);
• Zavodskyi District Administrative Service Centre (11/5 Tsentralnyi Avenue);
• the Tourist Information Centre (20 Admiralska Street).

The winners of the Youth Participatory Budget are to be announced by 2 July.

Mykolaiv’s Participatory Budget

It should be noted that in September 2017, members of the Mykolaiv City Council approved the Regulations «On the Participatory Budget of the City of Mykolaiv». The city introduced a mechanism to involve the public in the allocation of funds from Mykolaiv’s city budget.

In 2018, Mykolaiv residents’ projects were selected for the first time as part of the «Participatory Budget». Nine large and nineteen small projects were selected as winners and shared 10 million hryvnias between them. You can read more about the fate of the unsuccessful projects in the article by NikVesti.

Subsequently, residents of Mykolaiv proposed 111 projects for implementation in 2020 as part of the Participatory Budget.

In 2021, Mykolaiv residents submitted 166 ideas as part of the «Mykolaiv Participatory Budget for 2022» programme, of which 125 were put to the vote. Forty projects were selected as winners, totalling 20,347,980 thousand hryvnias. These included 12 large-scale projects, 21 small-scale projects and seven social projects.

However, during the state of emergency in 2022, no funds were allocated from the local budget for capital projects. And since the «Participatory Budget» specifically provides for such expenditure, the implementation of all ideas was temporarily suspended.

In February 2025, a new participatory budgeting programme for 2025–2027 was approved in Mykolaiv. The total funding for the programme will amount to over 45 million hryvnias.