E=mc²: the formula no humanitarian mandate teaches

Sixteen years in civil society and twelve in humanitarian work have taught me one thing: whenever a society treats vulnerable groups as a burden, it loses. People with disabilities, veterans, internally displaced people, LGBTQI+ community members — all of them usually get filed under "aid recipients." The system keeps treating this work as a cost line rather than an investment.

For years I have explained the opposite to colleagues using Einstein's school formula. E equals m times c squared. E is the outcome: a resilient community where everyone can reach their potential. m is people — every resident, including those we label vulnerable. Even a gram of matter hides enormous energy; every person hides potential that stays invisible only because of the barriers around them. And c² is the accelerator: accessible infrastructure, absence of discrimination, trust, equal opportunity. That is what turns a community's passive mass into active energy.

A ramp or a low-floor bus is not only for a wheelchair user — mothers with strollers, older people, couriers with heavy bags use it too. One accessibility feature raises mobility for several groups at once. And there is a second effect: when business, government, activists and people with different lived experience sit at the same table, workable solutions emerge that none of them would have reached alone. I have watched this happen while coordinating the PSEA network in Ukraine.

Is inclusion even possible now, with fewer resources, less time, less safety? My answer stays the same: inclusion does not compete with a community's survival for the same resource — it is how that resource stops being lost. War does not cancel this arithmetic. It only raises the cost of the mistake, because a person who was not heard before 2022 is now much harder to find — they may have fled, lost their documents, or ended up under occupation.

War does not create the problem of formal inclusion. It exposes it.

Ukraine has building codes meant to make premises accessible. On paper, everything looks flawless. In practice, I regularly see a ramp built at an angle no one can climb unassisted, or a door so heavy, because of that same code, that a wheelchair user cannot open it alone. Baby-changing rooms are traditionally placed only inside women's restrooms — a father holding a baby has no such room available to him.

Inclusion exists in the label on the door, not in the logic behind it.

Sometimes it works the other way. In an office in Kyiv, I saw a restroom made gender-neutral and, thanks to the building's own technical limits, wheelchair-accessible at the

same time, with period and hygiene supplies placed inside. No statements about inclusivity, no report about "vulnerable group engagement" — just people who thought about how a real person would use that space.

The same holds in wartime programming. A heating point can meet every Sphere standard and still be unreachable for a wheelchair user if the entrance has a 15-centimetre step. A payment notice can be translated into several languages and still be useless to someone with a hearing impairment if the only channel is a loudspeaker in the square. The gap between formal compliance and real accessibility is visible only to someone who checks the outcome, not the report about it.

Two years ago I had surgery, and for a long stretch of rehabilitation my abdominal muscles were held together only by a corset. Getting around Kyiv in that condition, I understood for the first time — physically, not abstractly — how much pain that gap costs. Passersby in a hurry bumped into my stomach on the subway. I once had to navigate steep stairs to a basement event venue on my own. Offices and institutions proclaim inclusivity on their websites, but almost none of the people writing those statements know what it means to move through a day when something in your body isn't working.

SEAH is always about power

That kind of barrier is physical. But there is another kind, built not out of concrete and doorframes, but out of dependency. Sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment in a humanitarian context is, above all, a question of power — authority and dependency. A person who has lost their home, belongings and documents sees a humanitarian worker as the sole gatekeeper to food, shelter, cash. The fewer alternative lifelines they have, the fewer levers they have to defend their rights if something goes wrong. That is why "Leave No One Behind" inside the UN system in Ukraine has to function as an integration rule, not a declaration.

I use an exercise in SOGIESC trainings: imagine waking up in a different body. What do you feel in the first seconds? It sounds naive, but it exposes the most common mistake in the sector — decisions about vulnerable groups are usually made by people who understand their problems from stereotype, not from the inside.

This is not abstract. A written complaint form is useless to someone who cannot read; a distribution point down a dark alley is unreachable for a woman on her own - and both gaps are invisible to anyone who has not walked that route themselves. Only the people living with these barriers can point them out before they turn into leverage for abuse.

Vitalii Zakharchuk, UN Ukraine RCO Senior National PSEA Coordinator