The HONOR Project: OISE joins global effort to strengthen Ukraine’s recovery in rural communities
A recent international research partnership with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) is helping support Ukraine's long-term recovery from war by studying how co-operatives can strengthen rural communities, empower women, and help rebuild the country’s agri-food sector.
The HONOR Project – short for Honouring the Contribution of Rural Women to Ukraine's Agri-Food Systems – is a seven-year initiative led by SOCODEVI, one of the world’s leading international co-operative development organizations – which, since 1985, has worked to strengthen communities around the world by building and supporting co-operatives and mutual enterprises.
The HONOR Project is being funded by Global Affairs Canada, with $19.5-million CAD and will run until 2032.
The initiative – which began in 2025 – aims to strengthen Ukraine's agri-food sector by supporting agricultural co-operatives, improving food security, promoting climate-smart agriculture and creating new opportunities for women and other vulnerable groups in rural communities by 2032.
Working in about 10 regions across Ukraine, the project is expected to help more than 7,000 people while strengthening 50 agricultural co-operatives in dairy, grain, horticulture, berries, vegetables and honey production.
“For us, the focus is on giving people the opportunity to be able to not only survive, but also to rebuild their lives after this initial shock of the war, and so our focus is on resilience and helping people to be able to continue to do the work on farm and to grow the cooperatives, to be able to do value added processing, export development, marketing. And to start to build the infrastructure that they need to have a strong co-operative movement,” said Erin Mackie, program director for SOCODEVI’s programming in Ukraine.
SOCODEVI is implementing the project with Ukrainian partners including the Dnipropetrovsk Agricultural Advisory Service (DAAS), the Rural Women's Business Network and the Co-operative Academy. Together, they’ll provide training, coaching, business planning, financial management and other supports to help rural producers strengthen their businesses and communities.
How OISE is supporting Ukraine’s recovery
A key part of the HONOR Project is research support led by Dr. Marcelo Vieta, associate professor and chair of OISE's Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education and, until recently, director of the Centre for Learning, Social Economy & Work (CLSEW).
Vieta’s team, including co-lead researcher and OISE alumna Fiona Duguid, have started and will continue to study how co-operatives contribute to Ukraine's post-war recovery while helping strengthen the country's co-operative education and research infrastructure.
“We're assisting in the applied research and the training component of the HONOR initiative. So connecting our expertise and our research, but also similar experiences from around the world, best practices, to see how it can inform new co-operative development in Ukraine currently, and in particular around issues of gender and women's initiatives in the agri-food sector in Ukraine,” said Duguid, who earned a Master of Education and PhD at OISE.
The research will also create research and partnership opportunities for our OISE and U of T community.
“We're going to do a multiple set of case studies. We're going to be employing students from the University of Toronto and from OISE to help us with that task,” she says.
Vieta said the team also plans to work with recently graduated scholars and academics in Ukraine, to create opportunities for collaboration while building local research capacity.
What are co-operatives and why are they important?
Co-operatives are organizations that are owned and run by the people who are a part of them, rather than by outside investors. Members pool resources, make decisions together and share the benefits. The goal of co-operatives is to help communities work together to solve problems, strengthen local economies and keep more of the benefits close to home.
The core of the HONOR Project is the co-operative model, which is allowing farmers and producers to share resources, services, training and market access while strengthening local economies.
“[Co-operatives] are very adept organizations at staying local, improving and stimulating local economies, because the money is local, produced locally and owned by local people. So they're very good for community economic development,” said Vieta.
The approach is particularly important as Ukraine works to rebuild its agricultural sector while continuing to cope with the impacts of war.
“In Ukraine, [co-operatives] they're showing to be quite resilient” said Vieta “and they're also very resilient in times of crisis, often they emerge in times of crisis, or are even made stronger in times of crisis, because they really do rally the community around an economic activity.”
Through this initiative, the goal is also to support Ukraine’s long-term economic recovery by helping producers meet European Union standards and expand their access to national and European markets.
Supporting women in rural communities
Women are a central focus of the HONOR project, reflecting the additional roles many have had to take on after the war has disrupted families, farms and rural communities.
“A lot of men have gone to serve [in the war],… [women are] looking after their families, they're looking after the farm business, and they're also volunteering, in many cases, helping to support humanitarian aid, to help the military, to help the humanitarian efforts in their own communities. Their burden has only increased, and our work is helping to support them,” said Mackie.
The HONOR project is supporting and empowering women by providing mechanized technology, leadership development training, entrepreneurship funding, co-operative training and networking opportunities.
“Many of these women have become leaders in their co-operatives. They've become leaders in local government. They've become advocates for the needs of their communities,” said Mackie. “It's also giving them an opportunity to be active agents of change, and to actively improve their own communities. And so that's probably the most empowering aspect of the work that we're doing.”
Research with global impact
Beyond supporting Ukraine's recovery, the project will also help build new knowledge about how co-operatives can support recovery in war and post-conflict situations.
Graduate students from OISE and the University of Toronto will have a chance to contribute to case studies and applied research and work with Ukrainian researchers and academic partners, to develop insights that could help guide recovery efforts around the world.
Mackie said the collaboration with OISE research team and U of T students is bringing an important new dimension to the HONOR Project, which they didn’t have in past projects.
“This is a different approach that we're taking in terms of having the research stream, and so we are excited to have the University of Toronto involved in this project, and to be able to rely on the credibility and the expertise of Marcelo and his team and to connect academics in Ukraine with Canadian academics.”
Vieta is grateful to be part of the HONOR Project and looks forward to seeing how the work can support recovery efforts in other countries affected by war and conflict.
“For Ukraine to be able to articulate the possibilities and strengths of co-operatives for its own post-crisis recovery, but also for the sustenance and expansion of its economy, to bring it up to standards so it can get into the EU…[knowing] that we've assisted in some way... would be really fulfilling,” said Vieta, “and for this model to be able to be used in other crisis and conflict zones in the world, I think is going to be another takeaway. I'm already seeing those connections happening. So I'm really looking forward to being a part of that.”
Set to wrap up in 2032, the HONOR Project aims to support Ukraine’s recovery and rebuilding efforts while equipping communities with the skills, knowledge and technologies needed for long-term resilience and growth.