In many villages of the Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Mykolaiv and Odesa regions local water can’t be used even for personal hygiene, watering kitchen gardens and cattle. There are a few villages completely deprived of own water.

Tackling the problem of centralized water supply for the population, using trucked water, has been a part of the state policy for almost 20 years but only PowerPoint deep. Ukrainian government members have never considered the problem to be a high priority task, «as water is delivered to villages». The state of play in the state policy sphere has been covered in the position paper of the Swiss-Ukrainian project DESPRO. Decentralisation tried to get to know what life is like in the «waterless» villages, how threatening the problem is and what is necessary for it to be solved.