The month of April kicked off the mentoring sessions and data collection meetings with officials from the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) and the Ministry of Environment and Spatial Planning (MESP) that Kosovo Women’s Network (KWN) organizes with the aim of increasing understanding of Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) basic concepts and implementation among these two ministries.
Most of the representatives that KWN mentored this week, where not present at the workshop on GRB that was held in March. These sessions therefore were very fruitful for they resulted into a greater number of officials within the MTI and MESP being informed on the basic concepts of GRB. Besides this, the representatives, same as during the previous meetings, presented KWN the main activities of their departments and also specific expenditures, investments and programs were discussed aiming to integrate GRB in those documents. Agreements were made to send follow-up questions in order to get data which will contribute to the analysis that the grantee will conduct on the budget and policy documents of the ministry.
KWN made some interesting findings during these meetings in relation to the processes of data collecting within some sectors of the ministry. For example, during the meeting with the Chief Executive of the Kosovo Business Registration Agency, it became apparent that the first step of doing GRB has been made within this Agency. For, since 2012 within the framework of business registration, data has been segregated by gender. Meaning that businesses that are registered in this agency are divided by gender. In this way, the agency has been able to generate and analyze data and information based on gender which has shown that the number of businesses owned by women and registered has been growing throughout these years.
KWN is now collecting data, analyzing and processing this for each department, division and agency. The following steps are setting up meetings with a few more representatives, keeping close contact with the ones that have been mentored in order to assist them with the integration of a gender perspective in their activities, policies and budget documents.
