Breaking barriers to Agriculture in Ukraine

It has been a month since I arrived in Kyiv, and it has flown by. I will describe my impressions of the city and culture in a future post. For now, I intend to limit myself to the organization and the project that I am working on.

With MBAs Without Borders’ support, I am one of 10,000 or so people working under The World Bank Group (WBG) umbrella. As a rough sketch, the WBG is divided into 5 chunks: 1) International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) 2) International Development Association (IDA) 3) Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) 4) International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) 5) International Finance Corporation (IFC)

Overall, WBG’s vision is to work for a world free of poverty. IFC is the arm that deals exclusively with private sector. IFC is in turn split into Financial Products, such as syndicated financing and equity & debt funds, and Advisory Services.

Advisory covers such things as creating access to finance, restructuring and privatizing state-owned enterprises, and improving the regulatory environment in developing countries. It is this last item that my project is involved in. The team has done two main things over the past years. First, it has published a yearly country-wide survey of 3,000 businesses that assesses the business environment and burdens that face start-up and mature businesses in many sectors. Second, based on the results of this survey, it has worked directly with government to draft legislation to improve the business environment across all sectors. Examples are laws on permits, inspections, certifications and technical regulations.

Now, the project is moving on to digging deeper into specific sectors. Our current focus is agribusiness. Agriculture has played a huge role in Ukraine’s past - both before and during Soviet times. Looking to the world markets, Ukraine has the capacity to become a strong supplier to both Russia and EU. However, poor regulations and low innovation prevents Ukraine from tapping into these markets or acceding to WTO conventions.

Over the next 6 months, I will be working with a legal analyst and quantitative researcher to move this component of the project forward. We have begun creating an inventory of current laws, and gotten up to speed on EU legislation and best practices in food safety and agriculture. We are also starting to set up focus groups across Ukraine with farmers, producers, farm managers and other stakeholders such as government officials. Our first trip, south to Mikolaiv (where IFC has an agriculture supply chain project) and Kherson is in 10 days. To prep for that, I’m creating presentation materials, developing contacts and continuing my background reading to make sure that I know everything I need to know to facilitate these focus groups and to speak at the right level with government officials.

So, that’s a (brief) background on everything project-related at the moment. Over the next few posts, I’ll share a little about IFC’s culture and life in the bubble that we call Kyiv.