Ukrainian water managers are packing their bags — and their questions
At the end of November, twelve women and men from the Kirovohrad region of Ukraine will board a train heading west. They are mayors, municipal officers, environmental activists, and water management specialists — and for six days, they will travel through Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and Hungary, visiting wastewater treatment plants, restored rivers, and communities that have faced water challenges not unlike their own.
The trip is the centrepiece of the Visegrad–Ukraine Water Solutions Exchange, a project led by the Brno-based environmental organisation NESEHNUTÍ in partnership with NGO FLORA from Kropyvnytskyi and civil society partners from all four Visegrad countries.
Why water, and why now?
The Kirovohrad region faces a quiet but serious crisis. Rivers are drying up. Soviet-era water infrastructure is crumbling. Groundwater levels are falling. Communities that once had dozens of functioning water sources now struggle to find clean drinking water. The legacy of uranium mining adds radioactive contamination to an already complicated picture — and climate emergency is making everything worse.
At the same time, Ukrainian municipalities have limited access to international experience and the practical know-how needed to design realistic solutions, apply for funding, or advocate effectively for change. That is precisely the gap this project aims to close.
Getting ready
Twelve selected participants joined an online preparatory session with the NESEHNUTÍ and FLORA teams. It was not a lecture — it was a conversation. Each participant presented the specific water challenges facing their community: a reservoir that has been deteriorating for thirty years and serves ten thousand people; a river that is silting up and turning into a marsh; wells and springs that are drying out one by one; ageing pump stations running on infrastructure from 1959.
The session made one thing clear: the problems are different in their details, but they share common roots — underfunding, outdated infrastructure, weak legal frameworks, and a lack of exposure to solutions that actually work elsewhere.
What the trip will look like
The journey begins in Warsaw on 24 November, where participants will meet experts from Warsaw University of Technology, a water quality monitoring technology company, and Poland's national water authority — covering topics from blue-green infrastructure to drought risk planning and EU investment financing. From Warsaw, the group travels by minibus through Czechia — stopping in Ostrava, Krnov, and Brno — before heading to Zvolen in Slovakia and concluding in Budapest.
Each stop has been chosen deliberately. In Krnov, participants will visit a wastewater treatment plant that generates most of its own energy through biogas — a detail of particular relevance for communities whose infrastructure is vulnerable to power cuts. In the South Moravian countryside, they will see how landscape water retention measures work in practice. In Slovakia, they will visit decentralised wastewater treatment installations designed for small villages — exactly the scale many Kirovohrad communities need. In Budapest, they will meet members of a coalition of over thirty NGOs and municipalities working together on water issues, and discuss what cross-sectoral cooperation looks like when it works.
All sessions will be consecutively interpreted into Ukrainian. The group will travel together and have plenty of time for the informal conversations that often matter as much as the formal programme.
What comes next
The study trip is not the end of the project — it is the beginning of its most important phase. After returning home, participants will develop concrete action plans for their municipalities, drawing on what they have seen and heard. The project team and V4 experts will support this process, helping to turn inspiration into documents that can guide real investments and funding applications.
We believe that when people see something working with their own eyes — and talk to the people who made it work — something shifts. That is what this trip is designed to do.
The Visegrad–Ukraine Water Solutions Exchange is supported by the Visegrad Fund. Project partners include NGO FLORA (Ukraine), Academy of Polish Careers (Poland), Združenie Slatinka (Slovakia), and Civil College Foundation (Hungary).
International Visegrad Fund
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, TRANSITION programme
