Attachments
Strategic Overview and Operational Context
Winter 2024-2025 marks the third winter since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. The winterization response was marked by notable operational strengths. National-level coordination, combined with strong sub-national leadership across regional hubs, enabled better alignment of partner activities and improved the geographic distribution of assistance. Sub-national coordinators played a vital role in maintaining close contact with local authorities, troubleshooting emerging issues, and supporting targeting.
The updated Winterization Recommendations 2024–2025 were widely used by partners and contributed to the consistency of the response. Tools such as the firewood calculation guidance and clear eligibility parameters for each assistance modality helped harmonize interventions and strengthened partner decision-making. The use of harmonized tools, including the Joint Shelter Cluster PDM questionnaire and RAIS+ (Ukraine Assistance Monitoring System), enhanced data comparability and accountability across the response. Overall, partners demonstrated strong adaptability, particularly in regions experiencing new displacement, allowing for timely scale-up and improved coverage of priority needs. Highlights of Winterization 2024-2025: 1. During the 2024-2025 winter season, the Shelter Cluster partners collectively reached over 1 million individuals through winterization support against the Winter Response Plans
1.72 million individuals. The Cluster response was 71% cash-based and 29% in-kind. The response was geographically focused primarily on the crescent, with most of the support going towards winter energy (492K), winter cash for utilities (322K), and NFIs for winter (103K).
2. Planned activities for winterization included providing winter cash for utilities, winter energy, winter heating appliances (solid fuel/electric/liquefied gas heaters), NFI for winter, winter clothing, and insulation of substandard houses.
3. The Shelter Cluster promptly addressed the identified gaps in winter energy requirements as communicated by the Ministry of Reintegration and oblast military administrations. Partners efficiently mobilized resources to bridge these gaps, ensuring that the needs of vulnerable populations were met.
4. Assistance was guided by the principle of deduplication. The Shelter Cluster has consistently worked to minimize duplication in winter activities both within and between clusters through traditional coordination mechanisms. A new deduplication system, RAIS+, was established and utilized by partners to identify previously assisted persons.
5. In the 2024/2025 winterization effort, 60 reporting partners collaborated, with UNHCR, UNICEF, URCS, and IOM contributing the most, and involving 99 implementing partners, with UNHCR, UNICEF, URCS, and Proliska providing the most assistance.
6. Following Ministry of Reintegration Order No. 309 dated December 22, 2022, nine regions (excluding the Kyiv region) were identified as priorities for assistance with solid fuel, including both in-kind and cash modalities: Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk, Mykolaiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Kherson, and Chernihiv oblasts.
7. Following the release of the Winterization Recommendations 2024-2025, partners began planning and conducting assessments to ensure coverage of households impacted and affected by the recommendations. Many of the locations that selected cash as a modality were found to be in frontline and border areas, while in-kind modalities were selected based on previous years’ experience.
8. The standardized PDM reporting template (Joint Shelter Cluster Post-Distribution Monitoring Tool), as part of Winterization Recommendations 2024-2025, enabled partners to submit harmonized data across locations and modalities. This enabled the Shelter Cluster to create a unified Dashboard providing comprehensive and comparable insights at the national level.