Kyiv, 8 February 2023 – Five new adoption services have been launched all at once on the Diia portal:

• Registration as a candidate for an adoptive parent, foster parent;
• Registration as a candidate for custody, care of a child;
• Becoming a second foster parent or adoptive parent;
• Adoption: continuation of application;
• Adoption: deregistration.

The services allow users to formalize forms of adoption such as foster family, or a family-type orphanage, guardianship, or childcare; to extend the validity of their registration as being a possible adopter if the child has not been adopted within a year; and to cancel a person’s registration as a candidate to adopt a child.

The project was implemented at the initiative of the Adviser-Commissioner of the President of Ukraine for Children's Rights and Children's Rehabilitation, the Ministry of Social Policy of Ukraine, and the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, with the support of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Ukraine, with funding from the Government of Sweden.

The services were designed in such a way that some data is accessed from registries automatically. This makes the application and adoption process in general easier. In order to use the service, users only have to enter basic personal data, after which the system itself will make requests to the registers to verify this data, and supplement applications with extra information.

Tobias Thyberg, Ambassador of Sweden to Ukraine, emphasized that it is important for Sweden to support Ukrainian citizens, and children without parental care are among those who need the most assistance from the state.

“The transfer of public adoption services to an electronic format makes this process easier for potential parents,” Thyberg said. “Five new services were created according to this principle. This will be one of the factors that will stimulate adoption, and thus even more Ukrainian children will be able to find families.”

This is already the second set of adoption services in Diia. Last year, two services in this field were launched on the portal: submitting an application for a consultation on child adoption and registration as a candidate to become an adoptive parent.

Jaco Cilliers, interim UNDP Ukraine Resident Representative, stressed that UNDP has provided consistent support to the government's digitisation of the adoption process in Ukraine. The main goal is to create a full set of electronic services for people seeking to adopt a child, in order to facilitate this process for them.

“The services presented today are a logical addition to the services that were developed last year,” Cilliers said.

“This is another step towards the digitisation of the adoption process in the country, which is making this process easier for candidates, and therefore making it possible to create even more happy Ukrainian families and give parental care to even more children.”

Media inquiries

Yuliia Samus, UNDP Ukraine Communications Team Leader, yuliia.samus@undp.org