Opening the gathering, Bojana Stanojevic stressed that the Gender Equality Committee has been dealing with the issue of gender responsive budgeting for the third year running because it is impossible to improve gender equality without adequate funding. Gender responsive budgeting means recognising the interests and needs of both the male and female section of the population and is already the standard in developed European countries, concluded Stanojevic, who also took the opportunity to thank the partner institutions and organisations for their support in the work on furthering gender equality.

Snezana Lakicevic stressed that the inclusion of the gender equality principle into the creation of the budget would result in a more efficient use of resources, adding that political will whose main actors are the Government and Parliament is the key to the implementation of gender budgeting.

Diana Falloni said that gender responsive budgeting is a new topic in the field of gender equality and is an instrument for measuring and assessing how the joint funds belonging to a state are used to achieve equality.

Asya Varbanova believes gender budgeting to be a globally important topic and an excellent means to solve the problem of the gap between the policies and measures adopted by the state and their implementation in practice. Gender responsive budgeting is not merely an equality issue but an issue of policy efficiency and efficient expenditure of funds.

In the continuation of the seminar, Spanish expert Priya Alvarez spoke of the concept of gender responsive budgeting, role of various actors in the field and the experience of European Union member states. She pointed out that the application of a gender responsive budget is not merely an issue of ender equality, but also an issue of public finance management and it also relates to the need to make the budget process more transparent. It is not a matter of creating a separate budget for men and women, but of following how the budgetary funds are used to achieve equality since men and women have different needs. Thus a gender “blind” budget merely keeps reproducing social inequality. The role of the parliament is to follow, supervise and urge the Government to be responsible in implementing gender responsive budgeting.

Radmila Gujancic of the Uzice Women’s Centre and Vjera Rudovic of the Commission for Gender Equality from the Municipality of Stara Pazova presented the experiences of the local government level.
During the seminar, the participants conducted a debate, the deputies and representatives of the local government level exchanged opinions and experiences. Download the conclusions adopted at the end of the seminar here …