UN Women MCO-Caribbean hosts National Gender-Responsive Budgeting Workshop

THE UN Women

MCO-Caribbean on Thursday opened a twoday National Gender-Responsive Budgeting Workshop for government finance officers and gender focal points in Guyana.

About 30 persons from several agencies are participating in the workshop, which will allow them to better apply gender-responsive tools to budgeting.

According to a press release, the Caribbean, as part of the EU-UN Caribbean Regional Spotlight Initiative, is benefitting from a series of interventions to support the region’s budget planners and analysts and gender focal points to enhance their understanding and application of gender- responsive budgeting (GRB) techniques in the national budgeting processes has been planned.

“Gender responsive budgeting is a strategy to achieve gender equality, by ensuring that interventions required to eliminate inequalities between women and men and boys and girls are adequately financed,” the release stated.

The workshop gives an understanding of what is violence against women and girls, its effects, and how budgeting can be used to address the issue more effectively and strategically.

The workshop is one step in sensitising key stakeholders on how to effectively apply gender-responsive budgeting as a tool to support violence against women and girls (VAWG) prevention and response. The goal is to reduce and eventually end all forms of violence against women and girls. Effective budgeting is one way to do so, according to the UN Women MCO.

National capacity-building workshops were convened in Jamaica and Guyana, and one will be held in Trinidad and Tobago on March 13 and 14, 2023.

These two-day national workshops have two main objectives: Enhancing analytical and technical skills for analysing public expenditures in different sectors to address VAWG, by using the manual for tracking and assessing budget allocations for addressing VAWG using examples from the pilot experience in Grenada.

The European Union

(EU) and the United Nations (UN) have embarked on a new, global, multi-year initiative focused on eliminating all forms of VAWG, the Spotlight Initiative.

“The Initiative is so named as it brings focused attention to this issue, moving it into the spotlight and

See page 6