To study at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), you need a laptop and a good sleeping bag. Students need it to sleep on the spot, when an air raid blocks Kyiv’s public transport or when classes end just before curfew. With its spacious and modern halls that look like corporate offices, the school is one of the few in Ukraine to provide the majority of its courses face-to-face. An island of resistance in a country where, after the confinement linked to the Covid-19 pandemic, many students have to take online courses for the fourth year in a row.
The KSE is much more than a school. It houses an incubator of a hundred start-ups that develop military technologies. The World Bank works with it to assess war losses and damages, companies consult it to redefine their supply chains, and the Ukrainian government asks it for advice on its economic policies, such as support for SMEs. The KSE served as a scout on the economic front of the war.
Its president, the former Ukrainian economy minister Tymofiy Mylovanov, went on leave from the American University of Pittsburgh, where he is an associate professor, to lead the institution which had come close to bankruptcy in 2016. Created in 1996 on the rubble of the communist era, the establishment is one of the first to teach the precepts of the market economy as the country emerges from decades of planning. Its management courses are now used to manage the human resources of territorial defence, the country’s reservist force, and its think tank, KSE Institute, has been restructured around three missions: assessment of destruction, sanctions towards Russia, and food security. “On all these issues, Ukraine has its say and not only the international institutions”points out Mr. Mylovanov.
The voice of the country
It is thanks to organizations like the KSE that Ukraine is one of the few examples of a functioning country at war. “If international aid is so important, it is partly because the country has strong institutions,” recognizes Anna Bjerde, Vice President of the World Bank for Europe and Central Asia who cooperates with the KSE. Maxim Nefedov, a former investment banker and former deputy economy minister, manages a team of forty people at the KSE, which includes specialists in agriculture or infrastructure, capable of giving the cost of a grain silo or an airport runway. “We have developed our own methodology, explains the economist, which allows us to have our points of view and sometimes to express our disagreements with the World Bank. » The KSE has developed an artificial intelligence tool that learns to recognize destroyed infrastructure on satellite or drone images. Data that is then associated with a reliability index and cross-referenced with government data.
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