23.03.2022.
Members of Ministry of Defence and Serbian Armed Forces attend workshop on gender responsive budgeting
The UN Women Programme Office in Serbia, in cooperation with the Ministry of Defence, has hosted a one-day workshop on Gender Responsive Budgeting for members of the organizational units of the Ministry of Defence and the Serbian Armed Forces.
The workshop, which was held in Belgrade, was opened by Assistant Minister for Budget and Finance Katarina Pavičić, who said that the Ministry of Defence was one of the first ministries in the Government of the Republic of Serbia to start implementing gender responsive budgeting practices and that its results in this field were particularly notable.
Pavičić thanked the organizer for the training and expressed her expectation that the cooperation would continue in the future. She emphasized that education in the field of gender responsive budgeting was extremely important for the Ministry of Defence, and that the implementation of the National Action Plan (NAP) on UN Security Council Resolution 1325 – Women, Peace and Security in the Republic of Serbia was a form of integration of gender responsive budgeting mechanisms, which started in 2015.
Bearing in mind that there are still open issues at the MoD and SAF, primarily concerning the gender responsive budget analysis, i.e. planning, the Assistant Minister of Defence for Budget and Finance expressed hope that the workshop would contribute to broadening knowledge and facilitate future integration of gender responsive budgeting principle into the process of budget planning and execution in the MoD and the Armed Forces.
Olja Janković Leković, project coordinator, addressed the audience on behalf of the UN Women Programme Office in Serbia. According to her, the Ministry of Defence has been involved in public finance reform from the very beginning and is an example of good practice when it comes to gender responsive budgeting.
According to her, gender responsive budgeting does not mean dividing the budget into men's and women's, but making sure that gender perspective is taken into account in all phases, from budget planning to its execution, in order to cover both men’s and women’s needs.
The workshop was delivered by Višnja Baćanović, an expert on mainstreaming the gender perspective into public policies.
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