The rural areas in Ukraine are seriously lagging behind in terms of quality of life and economic development. ICT and broadband could improve the prospects of these areas both for households and businesses. However, there is hardly a demand nor supply for this in rural areas.

The primary objective of the study was to assist the World Bank in the assessment of best practice options for top-down (creating the right market situation, stimulate infrastructure, content development) and bottom-up policies (for example stimulation and bundling of demand for ICT at the local level by local action groups) that could be applied by the Ukrainian government, to support the ICT infrastructure development of rural Ukraine and thus to improve the prospects of rural Ukraine.

In this project business cases were developed to see how subsidies can be used to make internet available at reasonable costs.
The project provides a number of policies that can be applied by the Ukraine government to support ICT in rural areas and the report also showed that funds to support these policies could be made available for developing ICT infrastructures in Ukraine, e.g. via the EU.