2023-10-28 16:35:04
Iryna Wolnyzka, 35, President of the private SET University in Kiev Image: Edited by FAS
The Ukrainian economy collapsed last year. But the IT sector is holding up. Programmers are in demand worldwide. The rocket fire is not the biggest problem for them.
The war reached Iryna Volnytska at the Miami airport. The now 35-year-old entrepreneur was on her way back from a vacation in Ecuador when Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022. Because she was stuck in the United States, she first flew to visit a friend in New York. “I didn’t have any warm clothes with me. I didn’t have a credit card either. We don’t use anything like that in Ukraine anymore. Everything is digital.” She stayed there for a few weeks, then returned to Kiev. The work had to go on.
Alexander Wulfers
Editor in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
Volnytska is the founder of SET University, a private information technology college based in Kyiv. She has worked in the tech industry for several years, and now she is trying to meet its large staffing needs and compensate for the deficit at state universities, whose training concepts are sometimes still stuck in the Soviet era. Volnytska is at the heart of the most dynamic sector of the Ukrainian economy, on which many hopes rest in the country for the victory over Russia and for the reconstruction of the Ukrainian economy when the war one day ends. Like no other industry, the tech industry has managed to come to terms with the constant fear of Russian missiles and simply carry on despite everything. In 2022, the entire Ukrainian economy has shrunk by almost a third. IT exports increased by 6 percent during the same period.
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