Armenia’s EU joint programming on course

April 29, 2016

Over the last four months, the Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) project in Ukraine has organized numerous activities with key stakeholders in and outside of Ukraine. As part of its component on cooperation with line ministries, on 25 and 26 February, the project delivered a training on the “Essence and stages of gender responsive budgeting” to the working group of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. During this training, the participants learned about the key principles that need to be taken into consideration while planning and implementing gender-responsive budgeting. Following the completion of the training, the working group is expected to prepare a report on gender budgeting, containing recommendations on improving key administrative and technical elements that are used in the budgeting process. Between January and February, the project organized activities which aimed to further increase cooperation with pilot oblasts in Ukraine. Within these activities, the project organized trainings on the basics of gender budgeting in the following oblasts: Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Zakarpattia, Kyiv, Kirovohrad, Mykolayiv, Cherkasy, and Chernivtsi. During these events, the working groups consisting of participants from oblast state administration finance departments, sectoral departments and statistics units, were trained on gender equality issues in Ukraine, gender budgeting principles and all the stages related to this process. Having been part of the training, the working groups are expected to present gender based analysis reports. With the aim of bringing the Ukrainian gender-based budgeting experience to other countries, on March 31, 2016 the GRB project organized a visit to Banja Luka, Republika Srpska. Organized with the Ministry of Finance of Republika Srpska, in cooperation with UN Women, the exchange workshop included representatives of finance ministries from the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova, Ukraine, Albania and Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). The participants were informed about the Ukrainian experience in gender-responsive budgeting, recognizing the fact that budgets are not gender neutral, and that during budgeting a special consideration should be given to the different needs of men and women.