“Promoting Gender Responsive Policies and Budgets” - Lessons from South East Europe experiences in the period 2011-2013

Support for gender responsive policies, programming and budgets has been an important priority area of UN Women in the Europe and Central Asia region. In 2011, UN Women launched a three-year project on "Promoting Gender-responsive Policies in South East Europe", financed by the Austrian Development Agency. The project covered Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The ultimate goal of the project was that policies, programs and budgets in the these countries contribute to the effective implementation of commitments towards women’s empowerment and gender equality in targeted sectors.

The publication summarizes the know-how that emerged from the implementation of the project from 2011 to 2013. It captures the most important lessons learnt, the approaches used and accomplishments and challenges related to promoting gender-reponsive budgeting (GRB) in the three countries and at regional level. The publication focuses on efforts oriented to improving individual as well as collective and institutional capacities to implement GRB. It aims to describe the diversity of strategies, accomplishments and challenges of different interventions that took place in each of the countries but also to capture common approaches to strengthen capacities of civil society and government institutions to integrate gender into policies, planning, programming, budgeting and monitoring of results.