Kosovo Women’s Network (KWN) held the workshop on institutionalizing Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) in the Ministry of Diaspora (MoD), on 14th of March. Directors and officials of the Ministry, who participated in the workshop, were introduced to the basic concepts of GRB, examples of how to implement GRB and ways to mainstream a gender perspective in the phases of planning, executing, monitoring and evaluating the budget. MoD is the second ministry with which KWN is collaborating to further the institutionalization of GRB in Kosovo this year.
     Osman Shahini, General Secretary of MoD, in his opening remarks, stated: “Gender equality is a family and institutional challenge. Gender Equality is an everyday struggle. When it comes to the statistics, there is no 50/50 representation, even though it should be like this. I think that we should do something in this direction. I thank you for your availability and we are at your disposal for meetings to further discuss this topic. Everything is in our hands to make things right.”
     One of the discussions that developed during this workshop was the underrepresentation of women in decision-making positions, and ways to tackle this. Behar Isma, Acting Director of Legal Department, stated: “In the €600+ level of wages, women are underrepresented, whereas in the other lower level of wages there is a much more equal representation of women. There are different factors that cause this but also, there are different ways to change and increase the percentage of officials in decision making positions that are women.”
     High interactivity between directors and officials of this Ministry was shown during the discussion in the second part of the workshop. They expressed their willingness to further gender equality within their Ministry and throughput the diaspora by the way of already thinking about various ways to integrate GRB in their daily work.
     The support that KWN offers to MoD is financed by Austrian Development Agency (ADA).