Speech by Executive Director Yves Carmel to the Rotary Club of Kiev

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21 Jul 2003

On July 21, 2003, STCU Executive Director Yves Carmel addressed the Rotary Club of Kiev on the activities of the STCU in Ukraine. The following is the text of Mr. Carmel’s speech.
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Dear friends,

It is a great honour for me to be here today and I wish to express my gratitude to the Rotary Club and your president, Mr Nicolai Barhatov for giving the STCU an opportunity to present our activities in Ukraine.

The STCU is an inter-governmental organisation created in 1996 by the United States, Canada, the European Union and Ukraine. Our mission is to engage former weapons scientists and help them convert their scientific activities to civilian, non-military applications.

The beginnings were modest in 1996, however the program has grown rapidly and today the STCU has pledged approximately US $95 million in funds to support the scientific community of the region. Additionally, the STCU has spent in excess of US $5 million in administration fees, thus more than US $100 million has been committed to this region.

Our projections are that by the fourth quarter of this year, the STCU will have reached the rate of US $20 million per year in project spending, making it one of the most significant technical assistance programs in Ukraine. And the STCU’s program is of particular importance to Ukraine since all of our spending is invested in grants to Ukrainian nationals, the purchase of scientific equipment for Ukrainian laboratories or financial support for Ukrainian scientific institutes. All our funds are invested here, for the benefit of Ukraine.

In the last few years, the STCU has extended its operations, with activities in the Republic of Georgia, the Republic of Uzbekistan and more recently, the Republic of Azerbaijan. Our organisation has more than 60 professionals and staff and we have a network of offices in Kiev, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Lviv, Tbilisi, Tashkent and Baku.

To give you an idea of our operation, the STCU currently funds more than 350 active projects all over the region that we serve and more than 7,000 scientists are engaged contractually in the execution of those projects. Our professionals provide technical monitoring, to ensure that the scientific content of each project is conforming to the requirements, as well as financial audit of each project to assure that project funds are used appropriately.

Since the STCU is the creation of governments, most of our funding is coming from our sponsor governments, the USA, Canada and the European Union. However in the last few years, we have developed a partnership program that allows non-governmental partners to come to Ukraine, invest in a scientific project and benefit from the expertise available here.

Today more than 30% of our funding is coming from our partners, rather than from our sponsor governments and we see that this sector of our activities will continue to grow in the future. Companies such as IBM, General Electric, Michelin, 3M, The Max Planck Institute and others have invested in Ukrainian scientific projects thru the STCU. In total, we have more than 100 partners.

Additionally to the direct scientific project funding which of course constitutes the core of our activities, the STCU has put in place a number of other initiatives designed to facilitate the integration of the scientific community of Ukraine with the global, international scientific community. Therefore, the STCU provides travel grants, access to specialized internet resources, funding for patent applications and intellectual property protection, and training of the scientists on topics such as:

• Intellectual Property Protection
• Commercialisation of Technologies
• Entrepreneurship and Technology Ventures

As you can see, the STCU has become a key partner for the scientific community of Ukraine and the Government of Ukraine. We now have a strong base and a very professional organisation and we are looking forward to further our partnership with Ukraine.

Thank you very much.