10% of Ukraine’s educational infrastructure was damaged by Russian shelling. How much damage has Russia caused to Ukrainian education?
Ukraine has suffered $144 billion in losses due to Russia’s strikes on Ukraine’s infrastructure during the full-scale war. This is the data as of the end of March 2023 from the “Russia Will Pay” project by the KSE Institute, the Centre for Economic Strategy, and “Prozorro. Sales”.
According to the project, as of February 2023, kindergartens, schools, and other educational institutions suffered $8.9 billion in damage. This is 6.2% of the total amount of damage to infrastructure.
How the Russians destroyed education in Ukraine in monetary terms
To calculate the damage to educational institutions, we used the methodology developed by the KSE Institute for the “Russia Will Pay” project. To estimate the financial losses to education, the Institute used the average area of a school or kindergarten and the cost per 1 sq m of building and equipping a new institution according to the Ministry for Communities, Territories and Infrastructure Development of Ukraine as of early 2022.
The cost of building a square metre of an educational institution as of the end of 2021 is $830 at the NBU exchange rate. At that time, it was UAH 27.26 per $1.
The estimated cost of building one school with new equipment using this methodology is about UAH 100 million.
“We use the same methodology as the World Bank. It considers everything destroyed if the damage is more than 40%,” explains Yurii Gaidai, senior economist at the Centre for Economic Strategy.
He says that a facility often requires almost the same amount of money to restore as to build a new one. In addition, this 40 – 50 % becomes much closer to 100% after one winter, given that partial destruction almost always includes broken windows and roof damage.
How much damage was done to educational institutions in the first year of the war
According to “Russia will pay”, Russians destroyed and damaged kindergartens and schools worth $4.4 billion in the first year of the full-scale war. In total, the damage to the educational infrastructure amounted to $8.6 billion.
In the first four months of the war, Russian shelling caused $2.4 billion in damage to schools and kindergartens. This period was the most destructive for educational institutions.
The KSE Institute notes that the figures had sharp changes in autumn.
“This is a one-time effect. At that time, the Ministry of Communities was streamlining information collection and assessment methodology. I assume that based on the results of the inspection reports, they saw that some of the damaged objects were not subject to restoration, and they got destroyed. Secondly, there are fewer kindergartens because the facilities with several buildings that were counted separately were removed from the database,” explains Gaidai.
By the end of 2022, the damage totalled almost $4.2 billion, including $3.2 billion to schools and $1 billion to kindergartens. However, Russian shelling did not stop, and in two months, the amount of damage increased by another $200 million to $4.4 billion.
The KSE notes that their calculations are primarily needed for reparations, which Russia will later have to compensate through international court decisions.
“In addition, this data will form the basis for assessing the needs for reconstruction and planning the educational network. However, when rebuilding infrastructure, it is important to consider the needs of a particular locality,” explains Yurii Gaidai.
Read the original article on Forbes Ukraine.