The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine intends to intensify the School Bus program to purchase 1.5 thousand school buses from domestic producers over the next three years, Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal said.
“We plan to use a number of tools to help domestic producers in the near future. The first tool is public procurement. We will expand the list of categories of goods purchased from local producers. In particular, we are talking about expanding localization to defense procurement. (…) An additional incentive will be the intensification of the School Bus program. This is the purchase of 1.5 thousand buses over three years from Ukrainian manufacturers,” Shmyhal said at the Made in Ukraine forum in Kyiv on Monday.
For her part, First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy Yulia Svyrydenko said that the Ukrainian government will look for opportunities to increase budget funding for the School Bus program to load up on orders from Ukrainian manufacturers.
“We have an existing School Bus program. We understand that the capacity of Ukrainian producers is twice as large as the budgeted limit of our program. Of course, we will look for ways to increase it in order to load Ukrainian producers with orders. We need 1600 school buses in the country now,” she said at the forum.
As reported, in 2024, as in the previous year, the state budget allocated UAH 1 billion for the purchase of school buses.
At the same time, Ukrainian manufacturers noted that if the amount of the subvention is maintained, bus purchases may be reduced by 15-20% compared to 2023, given the rise in bus prices.
School buses are purchased with co-financing from the state budget and local budgets.
In 2023, local budgets spent UAH 971.6 million out of the UAH 996.6 million subvention provided, while local councils purchased 434 buses out of the planned purchase of 546 school buses by the end of 2023.
In Ukraine, school buses are produced by Cherkasy Bus, Chernihiv Automobile Plant of Etalon Corporation, and Zaporizhzhia Automobile Plant of UkrAVTO Corporation.
