Gender-Responsive Budgeting in South Eastern Europe: UNIFEM Experiences

This publication captures lessons learned in the course of the UNIFEM project on gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) in South Eastern Europe (SEE). The project “Gender-responsive budgeting in South Eastern Europe: Advancing Gender Equality and Democratic Governance through Increased Transparency and Accountability was implemented in four countries - Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Former Yugoslav Republic (FYR) of Macedonia, and Serbia - in the period August 2006 to June 2010. It was realized with funding from the Austrian Development Cooperation, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland and Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in FYR Macedonia.

During the nearly four-year period of project implementation, a variety of approaches were used to promote GRB in each of the four countries, and across different government levels and institutions. The experiences demonstrate the richness of GRB as a tool, and that there are no cast-in-stone “recipes for its implementation. They also demonstrate the challenges experienced in introducing a
new tool in environments where sometimes even the basic preconditions for gender mainstreaming are missing.