On 15 July 2026 the kick-off meeting took place for the organisations selected in the competition “Engaging Civil Society in Ukraine’s EU Accession Process”. Twenty-seven civil society organisations received support from the International Renaissance Foundation; the project is co-financed by the European Union.
The Roma Women Fund Chirikli is among them. Over the coming year the fund will implement the project “Roma and National Minorities as Agents of Change in Ukraine: Civil Society Partnership for Human Rights Reforms and the EU Accession Process”.
Why this project now
EU accession is not only negotiating chapters and legislative change. It is also a test of how the state meets standards on the rights of national minorities — on paper, in the practice of public authorities, and in the daily experience of the communities themselves.
There is usually a gap between those three levels. A policy is adopted, yet in a particular community people either do not know about it or lack the capacity to implement it. That gap is what the project addresses.
What Chirikli will do over the year
The aim is to strengthen the implementation of policies protecting the rights of Roma and other national minorities. The instrument is professional capacity building for those on whom implementation depends: public authorities, local self-government bodies, civil society organisations and opinion leaders.
Ahead are trainings, seminars and expert meetings for representatives of government, local self-government, the human rights community and community leaders. A separate strand is the development of consultative mechanisms involving the Roma and other national minorities.
The second part of the work concerns the communities themselves: ensuring that representatives of national minorities take part in decision-making and in monitoring compliance with European Union and Council of Europe standards, rather than merely receiving the outcomes.
A public monitoring platform
Within the project the fund will create a public monitoring platform. Its purpose is to assess how Ukraine meets the standards of the EU, the Council of Europe and the Strategy for Promoting the Realisation of the Rights of the Roma National Minority through 2030 in the field of minority rights protection.
The value of such an instrument is straightforward: without independent measurement, reporting on compliance remains self-assessment. The platform gives civil society its own data for the conversation with the authorities.
Ten regions
The project will cover 10 regions of Ukraine: the city of Kyiv, along with the Odesa, Chernihiv, Vinnytsia, Volyn, Zakarpattia, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, Kirovohrad and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
The geography includes both regions with large Roma communities and areas where national minorities are few and mechanisms for their engagement are correspondingly less developed. The comparison between them is a value of the monitoring in itself.
Partnership and support
The project is being implemented in partnership with the NGO Council of National Communities of Ukraine, an organisation bringing together representatives of the country’s various national communities.
The fund thanks the International Renaissance Foundation and the Delegation of the European Union to Ukraine for their support. This work continues a direction Chirikli pursues on other platforms as well — among them expert discussions on national minority rights at the Ombudsman’s office.
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