“Build Back Better” – a Charitable Fund savED with the Support of EPAM Launched a Site to Raise Money for Restoring Access to Education

In almost 14 months of the full-scale invasion, Russia destroyed more than 400 schools in Ukraine, and more than 3,000 were damaged by shelling and blast waves. Hundreds of thousands of children were left without access to education – because their school was destroyed, damaged, looted, or is located in the border or front-line zone.

Despite the fact that the war continues, the savED charitable fund is restoring access to education in the affected communities. To raise funds for this recovery, EPAM volunteers created a saved.foundation website for savED, which allows the foundation to fundraise around the world to rebuild school buildings, provide shelters and create educational centers.

“Our children cannot afford waiting until the victory to return to their studies. For them, these months and years are passing completely differently than for adults. Therefore, our goal is to restore access to education where it is most needed, and not just to rebuild those destroyed Soviet school premises, but to act according to the “build back better” principle, so that children feel cozy, comfortable and safe. We receive a lot of help from international organizations, and we need the help of private donors and businesses in terms of physical reconstruction in particular. The website created by the EPAM team will help us reach out to caring people all over the world,” said Anna Novosad, co-founder of the savED charitable foundation.

The site was created by a team of 12 volunteers – specialists of the Ukrainian EPAM office. Talented designers, software engineers, solution architects, and developers joined efforts to develop the platform.  The project is empathetic, but at the same time quite complex and interesting from the point of view of the experience of using the Contentful CMS system. Special attention was paid to the integration of payment systems, thus additional studies of the markets of Europe and the USA were conducted in order to choose the right settings, localization, subscription, etc. The infrastructure was deployed from scratch in the AWS cloud environment. The site is a fully customized product with no ready-made templates used, having the main load on the FrontEnd part. To work with this part of the product the Vue.js framework was used. In order to enable convenient configuring of the viewing options for the site, the new Google Analytics 4 solution was integrated. Special attention of specialists was paid to the protection of personal data according to GDPR rules, which guarantees safety and minimal collection of personal data, because the donation takes place only at the licensed services, such as WayForPay, Fondy, Mombank, etc. While developing the site the issue of its accessibility was also taken into account – the requirements for screen readers were met, color rendering for visually impaired people and navigation for people with limited motor skills were provided. In addition, the peculiarities of user behavior in different regions of the world were analyzed.

“Supporting education has been one of EPAM’s strategic ESG areas for many years. And it became especially important after the full-scale invasion. It is not only about financial investments in the training of the future generation of IT specialists, who are actually the people of the country’s reconstruction era. Comprehensive support also includes the transfer of equipment, the transfer of data from the universities’ critical infrastructure to the cloud environment, as well as the creation of digital solutions that help the country to endure, win and recover. Being aware of the importance of educational processes prompted the company and EPAM volunteers to work on the development of the savED website for more than 10 months. We are glad that we have the opportunity to contribute our digital expertise to the restoration of Ukrainian schools,” comments Iryna Shkarovska, Associate Director of Experience Design and project coordinator from EPAM.

At the website saved.foundation users will find the programs that the foundation is working on, as well as the implemented projects. The EPAM team has developed a user-friendly and informative program design and integrated several payment systems, so users from all over the world can participate in restoring access to education for Ukrainian children.