Research project PowHer – Enhancing Digital Opportunities for Women in Ukraine through Swedish-Ukrainian Partnership
PowHer empowers Ukrainian women through digital skills, AI and entrepreneurship. By training local educators and building a Swedish–Ukrainian learning community, the project creates lasting pathways to employment, resilience and inclusive recovery.
PowHer is a project that develops capacity and drives change, rather than a traditional research project. The primary goal is to make real impact: strengthening Ukrainian trainers’ and organisations’ capacities. At the same time, the project creates excellent possibilities for research.
PowHer is funded by the Swedish Institute and led by Life Academy in partnership with KTH, Stockholm University and the Ukrainian partners Dnipro University of Technology, UDL System, and Sustainable Development and Innovation Agency.
This two-year project supports Ukraine’s inclusive recovery and EU integration by strengthening women’s digital skills, employability and entrepreneurship, with particular attention to internally displaced persons (IDPs) and women affected by the war.
PowHer will train 50–60 Ukrainian trainers and educators covering digital tools, AI, entrepreneurship and inclusive pedagogy. These trainers will, in turn, help reach more than 1,000 women and IDPs through accessible courses.
The project also creates a multilingual, open-access resource repository and a Swedish–Ukrainian Community of Practice for mentoring, peer learning and long-term knowledge exchange, enabling participating organisations to sustain and scale inclusive digital training beyond the project period.
This project is being implemented during wartime, which creates significant difficulties and challenges for participants in Ukraine. Russian attacks occur daily, and participants in our webinars sometimes have to leave at short notice because of air-raid alerts and seek shelter. We therefore need to organise the programme flexibly. Not all participants can attend every online meeting, and electricity and internet access are not always reliable.
Furthermore, because this is a hybrid war, social media is full of disinformation designed to create stress, including false information and misleading instructions for instance about issues such as food availability. Digital systems are also targeted: even our own course platform has been hacked three times. These conditions create enormous psychological pressure and fatigue. Sleep is often disrupted or poor because participants may need to leave their homes and move to shelters.
The project and the contact with Sweden provide positive energy and ideas for improving the situation, not only for the participants but also for their target groups (children, mothers, teachers, nurses, etc.) and team members. This is our second Swedish Institute-funded project, and we therefore have strong personal relationships with the team managing the project. Most of them visited Sweden in 2024, and we are now planning for Ukrainian participants to visit Sweden at the end of the project in 2027 to present their results and learn together.
The war in Ukraine has displaced millions of people, with women accounting for over 60% of IDPs. This group faces significant labour-market exclusion and a digital gender divide: only 54% of Ukrainian women possess advanced digital skills, compared with 68% of men.
The PowHer project addresses these challenges by creating a training ecosystem aligned with the EU Skills Agenda to support Ukraine’s recovery and EU integration.
The project collaborates with organisations in Ukraine, and participants are selected from both the private and public sectors, including universities, companies, community organisations and NGOs. Each participant carries out her own innovation training project targeting IDPs and women in Ukraine.
Digital skills for inclusive recovery and employment
PowHer – Enhancing Digital Opportunities for Women in Ukraine through Swedish-Ukrainian Partnership is a Swedish-Ukrainian capacity-development and training initiative focused on employment, job creation and sustainable labour-market integration. The project addresses the digital gender divide by expanding opportunities for Ukrainian women—particularly internally displaced persons (IDPs) and women affected by the war—to participate in an increasingly digital labour market and develop pathways to entrepreneurship and economic self-reliance.
The project brings together Swedish and Ukrainian expertise in digital transformation, education, gender equality, entrepreneurship and capacity development. It builds on previous cooperation between LifeAcademy, Stockholm University, KTH and Ukrainian organisations in digital education and hybrid learning.
A train-the-trainer approach
A central component of PowHer is the capacity-development programme PowHer Leaders: Digital and AI Capacity Building for Women Trainers. The programme uses a train-the-trainer model to build capacity that can remain within Ukrainian organisations beyond the project period.
Approximately 50–60 women trainers and educators from universities, companies, NGOs and training organisations will participate in an advanced hybrid programme combining on-site activities in Ukraine, webinars, digital learning, assignments, mentoring and peer feedback. Two cohorts will complete the programme during the project period. Participants develop and test their own training initiatives addressing the needs of women and IDPs. The programme is designed to correspond to 6 ECTS credits.The first programme cohort is underway, with 40 women from 17 cities and regions across Ukraine forming a strong network of educators, entrepreneurs and civil-society professionals ready to drive change. Using design thinking, they are developing their own training initiatives across a range of themes, including:- Digital skills programmes that help women access new employment opportunities and thrive in the digital economy.
- Entrepreneurship initiatives that support women in launching and growing businesses, particularly in communities affected by displacement and conflict.
- Community learning hubs that provide inclusive access to digital tools, mentorship and career-development opportunities.
- Training and support programmes that help vulnerable groups build confidence, resilience and future-ready skills.
The programme’s educational model combines synchronous and asynchronous learning with project-based learning and practical application. It draws on experience from earlier Swedish-Ukrainian cooperation, including the SI-funded U-Train programme, which addressed AI-enhanced hybrid education, digital assessment and teaching under wartime conditions.
Reaching more than 1,000 women
PowHer operates at several interconnected levels. While the intensive programme develops a smaller group of trainers, these participants apply their knowledge by providing training to other women and IDPs. In parallel, open digital learning resources provide opportunities for self-directed learning.
Through MOOCs, e-courses and other learning modules, more than 1,000 Ukrainian women and IDPs are expected to gain skills related to digital literacy, employability and entrepreneurship. Twenty-five participants from the advanced programme will also take part in an intensive training and networking activity in Sweden and contribute to sustaining the project’s Community of Practice.
Building a sustainable digital learning ecosystem
PowHer goes beyond individual courses by developing infrastructure for continued learning and collaboration. A multilingual, open-access resource repository will make training resources available for wider use, including GenAI-enhanced digital literacy tools. The project will also establish a digital Community of Practice and mentoring platform connecting Swedish and Ukrainian professionals for peer learning, mentoring and knowledge exchange.
The platform is intended to support personalised learning, feedback, access to relevant resources and virtual mentoring, while providing spaces where participants can exchange experiences and collaboratively develop educational content. Training modules created by Swedish and Ukrainian trainers will become part of this shared resource environment.
Long-term impact
The longer-term aim is to strengthen the capacity of Ukrainian organisations to provide inclusive digital education independently and at scale. By combining digital and AI competence with entrepreneurship, inclusive pedagogy, mentorship and institutional capacity building, PowHer seeks to improve women’s employability and economic resilience while contributing to Ukraine’s reconstruction and closer alignment with European digital, labour-market and skills frameworks.
The project is led by Life Academy in partnership with Stockholm University, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and the Ukrainian partner organisations Dnipro University of Technology, UDL System, and Sustainable Development and Innovation Agency. Together, they bring Swedish and Ukrainian experience in digital education, capacity development and crisis-adapted learning.
PowHer is aligned with European skills priorities by strengthening digital competences, employability, entrepreneurship and inclusive lifelong learning while building the capacity of Ukrainian organisations to deliver sustainable skills development at scale.
T. Karunaratne, I. Katernyak, H. Hansson, V. Loboda, T. Mamatova, G. Wettergren, L. Doroshenko, and S. Jansson (2026): ”Design-Thinking Based Curriculum Design for Women Entrepreneurship Trainers in Conflict-Affected Contexts”. Accepted at ICERI2026, 19th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation in Seville, Spain 9–11 November 2026.