NEWS AND VIEWS

Successful transfer of know-how from expatriates to Ukrainians

by Bohdan Hawrylyshyn

Several organizations that I helped create in Ukraine, and which I chair, have undergone changes in leadership as of January 1 of this year, heralding a change in the way activities are carried out in Ukraine today. I will treat them according to the sequence in which the respective organizations were created.

The decision was made in December 1988 to create a joint venture between the International Management Institute of Geneva (of which I had been a director for a couple of decades) and the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, more specifically, with its Institute of Economics. The decision was made together with the president of the Academy, Academician Boris Yevhenovych Paton at the suggestion of Prof. Oleh Bilorus, who became the first director of IMI-Kyiv and who, as many know, later became Ukraine's first ambassador to the U.S. It took nearly eight months in 1989 to go through the bureaucratic procedure to get official status, but less then four months to rebuild a facility for teaching purposes, hire faculty, get a library, and recruit students for the first post-graduate post-experience one-year M.B.A. program, which started on January 2, 1990.

Andrew Masiuk, a Ukrainian American, who started working at IMI-Kyiv from its inception, became its second director after Prof. Bilorus left for Washington. As of January 1 of this year Bohdan Budzan, who for four years had been director general of the International Renaissance Foundation and who in the fall of 1996 spent 10 weeks at the Advanced Management Program of Harvard Business School, became the third director general of IMI-Kyiv.

IMF-Kyiv has expanded greatly and runs four parallel M.B.A. programs: one of a conventional nature, one designed to teach teachers of banking (sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development) and two groups of an evening executive-type M.B.A. program, which runs over two years. The Institute, which has always had a license to operate, recently received the highest accreditation of the Ministry of Education. Thus, it not only can offer officially recognized degrees, but can also run a Ph.D. program.

One development of which we are very proud is that in the 1997 M.B.A. day program, 72 percent of the participants are women - a world record - which was achieved without any special campaigns or special conditions offered to women participants. The demand was strong and their qualifications excellent.

Financed by the American financier and philanthropist George Soros through his Open Society Institute, the IRF started its operations in the spring 1990, that is, before the independence of Ukraine. Its primary mission is to help create a civil society and help Ukraine become a truly open society. It is active in many domains, such as education, culture, publishing, support for creation of non-governmental organizations, etc.

Among the most significant accomplishments of the International Renaissance Foundation has been the retraining of 28,000 officers of the Ukrainian army for civilian occupations, which took place over the last three years. Some 12,000 have already found occupations in the civilian economy, 4,000 have created their own business.

Another very visible accomplishment - one with significant long-term consequences - is the Transformation of Education in Humanities Program. Thus far it has published 94 books intended as textbooks for all levels, authored by Ukrainians and checked by experts. Once tested, they will become official textbooks, since we are working very closely with the Ministry of Education.

The first executive director of the International Renaissance Foundation was Valery Hruzin, formerly a member of the editorial board of Vsesvit, the journal of foreign literature, the second director was Mr. Budzan (mentioned above) and, as of January 1, the new director is Viacheslav Pokotylo, a scientist by education with a good knowledge of the foundation's mission and Ukraine's needs. The former chairman of the executive committee, Dr. Bohdan Krawchenko, a well-known Ukrainian Canadian who has been in Ukraine for six years, was lately replaced by Hryhoriy Nemyria, who moved from Donetsk, where he was director of the Political Research Center.

The council to the Presidium of Ukrainian Parliament was created in March of 1991 at the request of the then- chairman of the Parliament Leonid Kravchuk by decision of the Presidium. The council consisted of ten renowned personalities with legislative and executive experience in their respective countries. These people were, in fact, the first ambassadors of Ukraine, even before Ukraine became an independent country. This group, with the help of a secretariat and some experts in Ukraine, has helped in the drafting the new Constitution and some legislative acts and helped commissions and members of the Verkhovna Rada learn how parliaments functioning in other countries. They also defended Ukraine's interests in various bodies, such as the House of Lords (in the United Kingdom) and the Council of Europe.

The first executive secretary was a Ukrainian American lawyer, John Hewko, who was replaced by another Ukrainian American, Mykola Deychakiwsky, who in turn was replaced by a Ukrainian Belgian, Zenon Kowal. From 1995 through December 1996 Ukrainian American lawyer Petro Matiaszek was executive secretary.

Since the Constitution that was adopted on June 28 did not provide for a presidium of the Parliament, the decision was made, in agreement with the president's office, the Cabinet and a number of committee chairmen of the Verkhovna Rada, to maintain the Council of Advisors to work with all three branches of the Ukrainian government to help with proper implementation of the Constitution and to introduce a more systematic approach to policy formulation and implementation.

This organization was started informally in 1991 under the leadership of Prof. Krawchenko and officially created by presidential decree in the fall of 1993.

Essentially its purpose was to provide an analysis of existing policies and prepare proposals for new policies to be adopted, particularly in the field of economic reforms. The center's first executive director was Tetiana Stepankova, followed by Anatoliy Solianyk and, as of January 1 of this year, by Dr. Vira Nanivska, a graduate of Lviv and Moscow universities who worked for the World Bank office first in Moscow and for the last four years in Kyiv.

We combined the secretariats and staffs of the Council of Advisors and the International Center for Policy Studies in order to have the capacity to help the all branches of government implement a more systematic and cooperative approach to policy formulation and implementation, particularly in the economic domain.

The approach consists of four phases: proper definition of the problem, search for real solutions, policy dialogues among relevant people and elaboration of action plans.

As chairman of the above organizations, I am grateful to Ukrainians from the diaspora, like Messrs. Krawchenko, Deychakiwsky, Masiuk and Matiaszek, all of whom remain in Ukraine and are now playing very useful roles.

We now have in all the above organizations, people from Ukraine in chief executive roles, all with very intimate knowledge of the specificity of Ukrainian circumstances yet with good exposure to the outside world and knowledge of contemporary ways of managing their respective organizations. This, in the language of the World Bank, can be considered a successful case of the transfer of know-how and the building of indigenous capacity.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, May 11, 1997, No. 19, Vol. LXV

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