Three teams from Ukraine have shared a £6,000 grant in the Innovation for Humanitarian Demining competition from Amazon Web Services. Their designs are designed to speed up the clearance of Ukrainian territories from explosive devices.
Three teams from Ukraine have shared a £6,000 grant in the Innovation for Humanitarian Demining competition from Amazon Web Services. Their designs are designed to speed up the clearance of Ukrainian territories from explosive devices.
According to the Ministry of Digital Affairs, more than 20 teams competed in the finals, and the winners were:
Teams automatically advance to the finals of the Sikorsky Challenge 2025 International Festival of Innovative Projects.
In addition to grants, the state is removing bureaucracy for demining operators: online certification is already available on the Diia portal — application submission, extension of validity, and expansion of scopes are done remotely. This should reduce the time between a prototype and its work in the field, when the bill is running low.
The humanitarian demining sector is picking up speed: since the start of the full-scale invasion, the number of deminers has more than doubled, and the fleet of equipment has increased from 0 to over 290 vehicles. The sector now employs 11,050 specialists from 125 operators; 37,048 km² of the estimated 137,000 km² that need work has already been cleared. Grants make it possible to quickly complete critical items — power, sensors, interference protection and the ability to easily repair equipment directly in the field.
This is a joint initiative of the Ministry of Digital Affairs, the UK government, the Sikorsky Challenge innovation holding, the UK–Ukraine TechBridge platform, and KPI. Its logic is not «long» grants, but a quick injection resource for specific technical improvements that can be immediately tested with operators. For engineering teams, this is a short cycle of «idea → field tests → feedback», for sappers — access to new tools that save time and lives.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how over 50 Ukrainian IT specialists in Kyiv joined forces at the AI Data Jam hackathon to train artificial intelligence to recognize explosives in aerial photographs. The initiative was a continuation of the spring AI Labeling Sprint and aims to accelerate humanitarian demining of Ukraine’s territories.
