Introducing EU4UA: A Platform That Helps Ukrainians to Find Housing and Jobs in Europe

EU4UA was launched in only 48 hours on February 28th by 4 tech entrepreneurs: the co-founders of Jobgether, Arnaud Devigne based in France, Alexandre Hernandez based in Spain, Juan Bourgeois based in Belgium, and the CTO Alexis Rodriguez based in Colombia.

EU4UA allows Ukrainian refugees to connect with European citizens willing to provide free emergency accommodation and find a job in no more than a click. Users can share their own housing in Europe available while companies can post their job openings.

It is thanks to the mobilization, in less than five days, of two hundred people around the world from Tech that this initiative was able to see the light of day.

The project founders aim to enable all refugees to find decent housing for free, and therefore, avoid the harsh conditions faced in refugee camps.

Once arriving in Europe, many Ukrainians started looking for a job to have a stable and reliable source of income without relying much on government social support.

After numerous interviews and surveys of what the refugees' needs are, the additional feature of job search was added to the website.

To do so, the EU4UA team seeks to use the internet and technologies to activate decentralized, spontaneous manifestations of solidarity in response to the unprecedented international crisis we are currently facing.

Thanks to this solution, over 50 000 Ukrainian families have registered to find emergency accommodation, and 23% of them have already found European hosts via EU4UA.

To date, most hosts are located in France, the United Kingdom, and Spain, followed by Germany, Benelux, and Italy. 64% of them have hosted or are still currently hosting a refugee family.

In terms of jobs, there are currently over 11,000 vacancies in the industries where Ukrainian talents desire to work the most: the hospitality industry (38%), housekeeping/caregiving/cleaning (30%), catering and restaurant business (26%), followed by administrative and office jobs, sales, IT, culture, and design as well as wellness and beauty sectors.

The EU4UA team believes that the tech for solidarity can become a game-changer in tackling any future potential crisis and leveraging civil society mobilization to address any kind of challenges.