Youth participatory budget: ten projects with funding up to $8 thousand will be selected in Mykolaiv

Mykolaiv City Council. Photo: archive NikVesti

Mykolaiv will hold a competition of ideas for the «Youth Public Budget». The projects will be funded by international assistance.

This was announced during a meeting of the executive committee of the Mykolaiv City Council on Wednesday, 10 September, according to NikVesti.

Director of the Economic Development Department Tetiana Shulichenko noted that this is a pilot project and will be implemented through the cooperation of the city council with Save the Children International.

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Young people aged 18 to 28 can take part in the competition and implement their own ideas for community development. The winners will be 10 projects with funding of no more than $8,000 each. They will be implemented with SCI funds.

«The peculiarity compared to the classic participatory budget is that a hackathon (an organised educational event) will be held. Participants of the hackathon will be able to take part in the submission of these projects at», said Tetiana Shulichenko.

Main dates:

• 23-25 September 2025 — the hackathon, where participants will be able to prepare their ideas;
• 26 September - 3 October — submission of projects;
• 20-27 October — voting by the city residents;
• implementation of the winning projects by the end of 2025.

The competition regulations state that young people will be able to submit their initiatives in various areas: entrepreneurship, adaptation to the labour market, mental health, support for IDPs, etc.

Voting for youth projects will take place online on the e-DEM platform, as well as in paper format at the ASC and the Tourist Information Centre at 20 Admiralska Street. It will last for 8 days, and the start will be announced on the city council website.

Mykolaiv's participatory budget

In September 2017, the deputies of Mykolaiv City Council approved the Regulation «on the Public Budget of Mykolaiv. The city introduced a mechanism for involving the public in the allocation of funds from the city budget of Mykolaiv.

In 2018, for the first time, Mykolaiv identified a project by Mykolaiv residents as part of the «participatory budget». Nine large and nineteen small projects won and will share 10 million hryvnias. More information about the fate of the winning projects can be found in the article NikVesti.

Residents of Mykolaiv proposed 111 projects for implementation in 2020 as part of the participatory budget.

In 2021, the residents of Mykolaiv submitted 166 ideas under the programme «Public Budget of Mykolaiv for 2022», 125 of them were allowed to vote. The winners were 40 projects totalling 20,347,980 thousand hryvnias. Among them are 12 large, 21 small, and seven social projects.

However, during martial law in 2022, no funds were allocated from the local budget for capital projects. And since the «Public Budget» provides for such expenditures, the implementation of all ideas was temporarily suspended.

In February 2025, a new participatory budget programme for 2025-2027 was approved in Mykolaiv. The total amount of funding for the programme will be over 45 million hryvnias.