This Compendium of Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) Best Practices documents GRB best practices identified against the gender equality objectives set in the European Charter for Equality of women and men in local life.The Best Practices are identified following a Methodology that strives to detect explicit and tangible GRB initiatives that demonstrate how the process of policymaking and budgeting on local level was reorganized to include gender perspective, how different GRB tools were applied and the impact on the status of women and men in the municipality. The Best Practices were gathered through a questionnaire, designed to collect information about the implementation of past GRB practices at local level.

The objective is for this Compendium to serve as a learning tool for local level officials and GRB practitioners. For this purpose, the GRB best-practices gathered and documented in this publication will be stored in the NALAS knowledge tree, GRB best practice database. In addition, the collection of case studies is published on NALAS website and is offered as a resource through the E-Academy and its GRB e-learning course2 . The desired outcome is for local officials and GRB practitioners to learn and possibly replicate these proven approaches or get inspired for innovating new ones.

The Compendium encompasses 17 best practices from 9 economies of the region: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Republic of Moldova, Turkey, Slovenia and Serbia. The practices are related to the following areas: gender participation, women’s economic empowerment, gender-based violence, sports, balancing work and life, and urban planning. The Best Practices are collected by NALAS gender associates and in cooperation with NALAS member associations of local authorities in the course of 2021. The publication also presents GRB champions – local practitioners, individuals who either work in the municipality or in municipal body/enterprise, or are representative of Civil Society Organizations (CSO) that contributed to the implementation of the Best Practice. The methodology for collection of good practices and editing of information on good practices was provided by Ms. Marija Risteska, NALAS Regional Gender Expert.

This publication is part of NALAS project “Promoting e-learning and regional knowledge base development on gender-responsive budgeting”, supported in the framework of UN Women project “Promoting Gender Responsive Polices and Budgets: Towards Transparent, Inclusive and Accountable Governance in the Republic of North Macedonia”, financed by Switzerland and Sweden.

Compendium of Gender Responsive Budgeting Best Practices