アナスタシア・ディエイェヴァ：テクノロジーと教育でウクライナを再建する

Ukraine has kept a tech workforce of more than 200,000 IT professionals at work since 2022. In some areas the number has grown. Over the same period, infrastructure has been systematically targeted, millions of people have been displaced, and daily life has been reorganised around air raid alerts. Engineers in Kyiv ship code between blackouts, and startups in Lviv keep onboarding international clients while their founders also coordinate volunteer logistics. IT exports still bring in billions a year and remain one of the economy’s main supports.

The Tokarev Foundation works on keeping that pipeline full. Its leader, Anastasiia Dieieva, will speak about the work at the Tech for Impact Summit 2026 in Tokyo on April 26.

The Foundation Behind Ukraine’s Tech Pipeline

The Tokarev Foundation was set up by Andrey Tokarev, a Ukrainian technology entrepreneur who built his career in the country’s IT outsourcing industry. He then put his resources into one question: how to make the next generation of Ukrainian technologists larger, better trained, and better connected internationally than the last.

The Foundation runs several programs rather than one. Coding bootcamps train adults, including displaced workers, veterans, and career changers, in the languages and frameworks the global market hires for. STEM programs reach young people in cities and in communities far from the established tech hubs, on the principle that a child’s access to computational thinking should not depend on their postal code. Innovation hubs give entrepreneurs without capital somewhere to work, physically and online. Digital skills courses cover the wider workforce, on the reasoning that a digitally reconstructed society needs more than software engineers; everyone who will live and work in it needs some of the same skills.

Dieieva runs all of this in conditions where students relocate mid-course, the power grid fails, and people the Foundation has trained may be called up to serve. The programs were designed from the start to absorb that kind of disruption rather than to recover from it afterwards.

Technology as Nation-Building

The Ukrainian government has made digital transformation a central pillar of its reconstruction planning. Before the conflict, the IT sector was already one of Europe’s busiest, with Ukrainian developers contributing to products used by hundreds of millions of people. Companies in North America, Europe, and Asia hired Ukrainian engineers because the work was good, and not only because it was cheaper.

The Foundation’s bet is that this base can carry more than economic survival. Most post-conflict recovery models put physical infrastructure first: roads, bridges, buildings. Ukraine needs those too, and the government’s plan does not skip them. Its plan also treats digital infrastructure and trained people as primary drivers of recovery rather than later additions.

In practice the plan calls for training tens of thousands of new technologists while the fighting continues, so the workforce exists when reconstruction speeds up; for innovation hubs that can anchor regional economies and draw domestic founders and foreign partners; and for STEM education for children, funded as an investment in future productive capacity rather than as an extra.

Other countries facing conflict, climate disasters, or economic collapse end up with the same design problem, which is part of why Ukraine’s reconstruction planning is being watched closely outside Ukraine.

What Conflict Zones Teach the World About Innovation

Some of the most useful lessons about innovation are coming from places that get very little venture capital and few conference invitations. When failure means survival rather than lost market share, companies and schools learn things that well-funded environments rarely have to.

Ukrainian tech companies were among the first to go fully distributed. Keeping an entire engineering team in one city had become an existential risk, so they spread out. The practices they built under that pressure are now studied by companies elsewhere.

The Foundation’s education programs had to accommodate students who move between cities, lose internet access for days at a time, and carry responsibilities no curriculum planner would have anticipated. The teaching that came out of that is modular, asynchronous, and assumes the learner’s circumstances will change. As climate disruption makes instability common in more places, that design has a wider audience.

Ukrainian developers have also become a kind of national representation abroad. The work they ship is both an export and a statement about what the country can still do.

Japan and Ukraine: An Unexpected Convergence

Japan has more experience in post-disaster reconstruction than any other country and has been a significant supporter of Ukraine’s recovery planning. Japanese know-how in resilient infrastructure, disaster preparedness, and using technology in rebuilding maps directly onto Ukraine’s situation.

There is a structural parallel too. Japan’s demographic and economic pressures have forced a national debate about how technology can hold a society together under strain: automation to make up for a shrinking workforce, digital services that reach older people in rural areas, innovation that keeps the economy competitive now that the easy-growth years are over. The pressures are different from Ukraine’s. The question underneath them is the same.

The Tech for Impact Summit’s theme this year is “Beyond Boundaries: Building 2050 Together.” The leaders gathering in Tokyo on April 26 come from different sectors and geographies. Several of them are working on rebuilding or reinforcing systems that are already broken or fragile, rather than tuning systems that work.

What She Will Discuss at T4IS 2026

Dieieva is expected to talk about technology education and ecosystem building as tools of national reconstruction, what it takes to run such programs while the conflict continues, and what other countries can take from Ukraine’s experience. She covers both the operational side (how to run coding bootcamps during a war) and the strategic side (how a country positions its tech sector as the backbone of long-term recovery).

She joins a roster that comes at technology and impact from several directions. Former Minister Taro Kono brings the policy side of Japan’s digital transformation. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson covers decentralised infrastructure. GLOBIS founder Yoshito Hori gives the keynote on entrepreneurial leadership. Kathy Matsui of MPower Partners speaks on impact-driven venture capital. Jesper Koll of Monex Group covers financial markets. Ken Suzuki of SmartNews, Sota Watanabe of Startale, and Ken Shibusawa of Commons Asset Management speak on information ecosystems, Web3 infrastructure, and patient capital.

Among them, Dieieva is the one whose programs are currently operating inside a war zone, which gives her a different vantage point on what impact technology costs and what it returns.

Why Executives Should Pay Attention

The Tokarev Foundation trains coders, runs STEM classes, and operates innovation hubs in a country under attack. For the senior leaders at T4IS 2026, that is a case study in operating through the kinds of disruption that global businesses now plan for routinely: supply chain breaks, climate-related displacement, political instability in key markets.

Ukrainian tech firms kept engineers productive through blackouts and relocations, and the Foundation kept enrolling students through the same conditions. The Foundation’s graduates, displaced workers and veterans among them, are entering a global labour market where few employers have thought to look for them. More than 200,000 IT professionals are still working in Ukraine and exports are still flowing, which is the Foundation’s answer to anyone who reads its work as aid rather than investment.

Dieieva has been running her part of that effort since 2022. In Tokyo she will explain how it is going.

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The Tech for Impact Summit 2026 takes place on April 26 in Tokyo. Seats are limited and allocated by invitation. Request your invitation to join Anastasiia Dieieva and other global leaders in Tokyo.