Whilst the front line remains active and rocket strikes continue to destroy the power grid, schools and homes, another coordination mechanism is quietly at work alongside humanitarian aid: the Early Recovery Cluster. It receives less media attention than food supplies or evacuations, yet it is this cluster that determines whether communities can return to basic functioning within weeks, rather than years, following shelling.
What is an early recovery cluster and why does it exist?
The UN Cluster System is a mechanism for coordinating the humanitarian response, introduced by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) in 2005 following the reform of the humanitarian sector. It allows responsibilities to be divided among UN agencies and international organisations: some are responsible for shelter, others for water and sanitation, and others for the protection of civilians. Early recovery stands apart from this logic. It is not a sector in the traditional sense, but rather an approach that should permeate the entire humanitarian operation.
The Global Cluster on Early Recovery (GCER) is led by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and it was the UNDP that, in 2013, together with IASC leaders, succeeded in ensuring that all other clusters — with the exception of logistics and emergency telecommunications — integrated early recovery principles into all phases of the humanitarian programme cycle. The logic is simple: the idea of a linear progression from the humanitarian phase to a separate recovery stage and on to development has proven to be flawed. The foundations for reconstruction must be laid even while volunteers are delivering bottled water.
The UNDP describes this approach as strengthening local ownership and capacity, relying on a deep understanding of the context, and addressing the root causes of vulnerability rather than merely the consequences of the crisis. The aim is to ensure that humanitarian aid does not create dependency, but helps communities get back on their feet.
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Ukraine as a test case
The cluster system was activated in Ukraine back in 2014 — following the outbreak of the war in Donbas. However, the true scale of the coordination effort only became apparent after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. The country is currently home to one of the largest UN humanitarian operations in the world.
The figures describing the scale of the destruction continue to rise. In February 2026, the Government of Ukraine, the World Bank, the European Commission and the UN published an updated joint rapid damage and needs assessment (RDNA5), which, as of 31 December 2025, estimates the total cost of Ukraine’s reconstruction and recovery at nearly $588 billion over the next decade — almost three times Ukraine’s projected nominal GDP for 2025. The sectors requiring the largest amounts are transport (over $96 billion), energy (around $91 billion) and housing (almost $90 billion). Armed attacks on energy infrastructure continue, and direct damage has already exceeded $195 billion.
Against this backdrop, early recovery work takes on particular significance. According to RDNA5 data, since February 2022, at least $20 billion in needs have already been met through emergency repairs and early recovery activities in the housing sector, energy, education, transport and other key sectors. This is not reconstruction in the traditional sense — it is rapid patching up, allowing people to return to their homes, hospitals to admit patients, and schools to resume teaching.
Who is doing what on the ground
In Ukraine, the UNDP acts as the lead agency for early recovery. Its coordination efforts are integrated with the work of other clusters—protection and shelter, led by the UNHCR, as well as food security, health, and water supply. The logic is as follows: any project to rebuild a water pipeline or repair a roof is immediately designed with a view to the future recovery of the community, rather than merely addressing an immediate need.
One clear example is the joint UNDP and UNHCR project ‘Demining and the Return of Internally Displaced Persons in Southern Ukraine’, launched in August 2024. It focuses on four communities — Zavodske and Shyroke in the Mykolaiv region, Vysokopillia and Velyka Oleksandrivka in the Kherson region — and aims to remove obstacles to people’s return: mines and unexploded ordnance, destroyed housing, and the loss of documents. In February 2026, a renovated village council building was opened in Zavodske, which now serves as an administrative and community centre. As part of the same project, seven destroyed houses were demolished in Shyroke and Vysokopillia, and around 14,000 tonnes of construction waste were safely processed. UNHCR, together with its partner NGOs ‘10 April’ and ‘Caritas’, has repaired 785 homes in these four communities.
Such targeted interventions — a village council building, restored water supply, a school with no mines in the playground — are the very fabric from which early recovery grows. As noted by the UNDP Resident Representative in Ukraine, Jaco Sielers, such facilities become the lifeblood of villages and towns, restoring education, healthcare, water, housing and utilities to the people. Recently, for example, new facilities were opened that provide clean water to over 9,000 residents of Bucha — a town that endured occupation in the early days of the war.
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Funding and partnerships
Early recovery in Ukraine relies heavily on bilateral donor contributions. In January 2025, UNDP received $20.79 million from the Republic of Korea for early recovery and area-based development projects in the Zaporizhzhia, Sumy and Kherson regions. The funds are being channelled towards the restoration of basic services – energy, water and waste management systems – and the rehabilitation of critical infrastructure, with a particular focus on vulnerable groups, including the Roma community, people with disabilities and LGBTQI+ individuals.
Another area of focus is cooperation with the European Investment Bank. The EIB, in partnership with the Government of Ukraine, has provided funding for the first early recovery programme — a €200 million multi-sectoral framework loan aimed at investing in critical infrastructure in conflict-affected areas and ensuring basic living conditions for displaced persons and host communities. UNDP has taken on the monitoring of 96 infrastructure projects, including hospitals and municipal housing facilities. Five social infrastructure facilities are being built in Myrnohrad, Donetsk Oblast.
A separate area of focus is the economic component of early recovery. In October 2025, UNDP, together with the Centre for Innovation Development, published a study that identified four regional economic clusters with the highest potential for Ukraine’s recovery: agricultural production and processing in Vinnytsia Oblast, logistics and trade in Odesa, pharmaceuticals and construction materials in Kyiv, IT and high-tech industries in the Kharkiv region. The study was conducted as part of the project ‘Strengthening the Financial Capacity of SMEs and Regional Economic Recovery through Cluster Development’, funded by the Government of Japan. The logic is the same as in the humanitarian cluster: to concentrate capabilities, create shared service capacities and support small and medium-sized businesses, which sustain the economy of frontline regions.
Weaknesses of the system
Cluster coordination in Ukraine has not been without its critics. In October 2025, the UN OCHA, together with its partners, published a synthesis of evaluative evidence on the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, which summarises the work of the inter-agency system over the four years of the major conflict. The document’s findings note that the formal coordination architecture, particularly the cluster system, was not fully adapted to Ukraine’s institutional context. Although coordination mechanisms ensured scale and coherence among international actors, in the early stages of the response they did not fully engage a broad spectrum of national civil society organisations — in particular informal or newly established groups.
Capacity-building efforts were fragmented and not embedded in broader localisation strategies. In the early stages, international actors often created parallel systems, and donor funding models continued to favour international organisations, limiting direct support for national actors. As a result, the potential of a strong Ukrainian civil society and a decentralised system of governance was not fully realised.
The absence of a single formal mechanism for territorially oriented coordination and joint planning is cited as a separate issue. At both the inter-ministerial and cluster levels, there was no formal framework for territorial coordination, joint outcomes or joint planning — particularly regarding nexus efforts linking humanitarian action with recovery and development. This gap has limited the system’s ability to align operational work with shifting national priorities.
In other words, the very idea — that early recovery should permeate the entire humanitarian response — sometimes gets bogged down in the field in Ukraine at the junctions between clusters, between the centre and the regions, and between international organisations and local government.
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How the concept works in other countries
Globally, the Early Recovery Cluster coordinates efforts across dozens of crises — from Syria and Yemen to Haiti, Afghanistan and Sudan. Led by UNDP, the GCER brings together 34 active global partners from the humanitarian and development communities, including UN agencies, the Red Cross Movement and non-governmental organisations. An independent evaluation of GCER’s work, commissioned by UNDP, covered six country case studies: Haiti, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Lebanon, Pakistan and Nepal.
Ukraine stood out as a special case among these contexts. The IOM estimates that Ukraine faces an urgent task of long-term recovery and reconstruction, requiring approximately $486 billion over the next decade — and as of January 2025, Europe was hosting 6.3 million Ukrainian refugees. This is a scale that the cluster system is encountering for the first time in a European country with a developed state infrastructure, a capable civil society and ambitions to join the EU.
Where is this heading next?
The Conference on the Reconstruction of Ukraine, held in Rome on 10–11 July 2025, served as another point of alignment between the UN’s cluster-based work and the political agendas of donor states. URC 2025 focused on four thematic dimensions: business, human capital, local and regional recovery, and integration into the EU.
Early recovery operates within this broader context as a bridging mechanism. Whilst major reconstruction projects go through the design, tender and funding stages, the UNDP cluster and its partners are plugging gaps in the system — where a school needs to open on 1 September, a hospital needs to admit the wounded, and the water supply needs to be up and running before the frosts set in. UN Secretary-General António Guterres, in a statement marking the publication of RDNA5, once again called for an immediate, complete and unconditional ceasefire as the first step towards a lasting peace.
Until then, coordination between the clusters, the state and donors will remain the key factor determining how painful each new year of war will be for communities on the front line and behind the lines.
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