Capacity building sessions held for budget planners, analysts and gender focal points in the Caribbean

Under the Regional European Union-United Nations (EU-UN) Spotlight Initiative, budget planners, analysts and gender focal points were brought together for national workshops in Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago to enhance their analytical and technical skills for analysing public expenditures in different sectors to address violence against women and girls (VAWG). A regional session was also convened with senior leadership in finance, statistics and gender equality from nine CARICOM countries to improve their technical capacity to better understand and apply international GRB better practices in national budgeting processes.

Gender responsive budgeting (GRB) is a strategy to achieve gender equality, where budgets or proposed spending is analysed and designed to ensure interventions to eliminate inequalities between women and men and boys and girls, are adequately financed.

Head of Delegation of the European Union to Guyana Ambassador Rene Van Nes made a call to action for gender responsive budgeting across sectors for eliminating VAW including to integrate some of the initiatives that commenced with the Spotlight Initiative Programme.

United Nations Resident Coordinator to Guyana Yeşim Oruç, in her opening remarks to the Guyana national workshop said she was very proud to lead the Spotlight Initiative Programme, generously funded by the European Union, in Guyana where from the Head of State to Minister Vindhya Persaud - co-chair of the Initiative’s Steering Committee - the effort, the passion and the commitment are vocal and strategic, and partnerships with civil society are dynamic and effective.

“The Government is budgeting for women and for ending VAW….For example, Budget 2023 tops up by more than 30% the budget of the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security – the Ministry with the primary mandate to provide services for vulnerable women including survivors of GBV,” the UN RC stated.

She highlighted that "the Budget makes additional resources available for programs that are critical to ending Violence Against Women. To name a few:

• For the construction of day and night care centres to benefit women and men in need of child-care services;
• For training of thousands of national and community leaders on gender and social inclusion and development of gender mainstreaming into decision-making processes;
• For legal aid services for survivors of domestic violence."

The UN Resident Coordinator encouraged sex disaggregation of the many Sustainable Development Goals indicators that are already tracked in Guyana’s budget processes. 

"...In keeping with SDG Goal 5, I urge for the establishment of the systems for tracking allocations made for gender equality and VAW that allow for cross sectoral coordination as well as for women’s organizations, civil society and the media to be able to understand and gauge the different impact of programs on men and women; and to constructively engage in improving, targeting and increasing the impact of the many successful programs," she said.

Article republished from UN Women Caribbean with edits by the Resident Coordinator's Office in Guyana