Change - Reginal Development Agency, thanks to the financial support of UN Women in Tirana, has implemented for 4 years the Gender Responsible Budgeting in two municipalities of south Albania: Vlore & Saranda.

It has been a great success as many of the recomandation addresed to local decision makers by our Organization with the cooperation of local groups of interests, have been included into plans, programs and strategies of local government units.

Gender budget is an analysis of the Municipality’s finances from the perspective of gender equality. It has to take into consideration all levels of creating budgets and redefines and restructures income and expenses of the municipality in order to neutralize gender inequality.

The objective of gender budget is to analyze all forms of public income and expenses from gender perspective and to define the result of spending and what it means for women and men and their situation in the society.

It is assumed that Municipality’s expenditure brings about different outcome for women and men as their social roles are different too. This means that all expenditure is gender related, not just programs directed at fighting inequality. Gender budgets use holistic approach and relate to the whole gamut of aspects, which had been previously neglected by other anti-discrimination efforts.

It must be stressed that gender budget does not mean a separate budget for women. It is not equivalent to being sensitive to women’s needs either. It aims at leveling off differences of chances for all citizens regardless of their gender. That is why gender budget should be accompanied by other programs to promote equality.

It is a challenge to analyze public finances from the viewpoint of gender equality. Statistical problems are among major causes of this difficulty. There is a necessity for performing a quantitative analysis of public finances and they have to seriously take into account qualitative analysis as well to avoid simplifications. One has to bear in mind that the results of the report make splashy news and are important socially.

In many cases in our municipalities there are budgets designed to fulfill only men’s needs rather than entire community, which means the needs of women are randomly ignored and not taken into account by Municipalities and its counselors. For instance, an enormous amount of the budget is allocated for football, but no funds are there available for a basketball pitch, volleyball pitch or tennis pitch.