Gender Responsive Budgets – Network of East-West Women

NEWW-Polska would like to welcome you to our “CEE/CIS Gender
Budget mailing list. The list was created as a response for the need
for information on existing tools of influencing governments’
policies often emphasized by women form the CEE and former Soviet
Union region. It is a direct outcome of the 2003 NEWW-Polska and NEW
Gender Policy Conference – “Women and Economy”, which took place in
the end on 24-27 of April in Gdansk, Poland.

The main aim of
the list is to build the capacity of women and women’s NGOs in
CEE/NIS to enforce economic rights and participate in economic
processes (Gender Budget Initiatives), introduce extensive
information on gender budget analysis and identify and support
concrete activities on gender budget initiatives to be undertaken in
the CEE/NIS region.

CEE/NIS is the only region in the world
where this idea is still relatively unknown and completely not
practiced and it is of great importance that women’s NGOs take part
in gender budget initiatives in order to ensure that the public
money are spend in a most efficient and economically justice way.

NEWW-Polska hopes that this listserve would be very helpful
in facilitating women’s participation and influencing the economic
decision-making processes. It will include examining the ways in
which women from the CEE/NIS region could safeguard their interests
in the process of integrating a gender analysis into public
expenditure policies and budgets.

Gender Budget Initiatives
can help to close the existing gaps between participation and
consultation in the formulation of new policies and legislation and
in the allocation of resources, ensuring that public money is raised
and spent more effectively. They can help promote greater
accountability for public resources to the people of a country,
especially to women, who are generally more marginalized than men in
decision-making concerning public money.

This listserve will
provide various information on gender budget analysis, good
practices from other parts of the world (and hopefully soon from our
region), accessible recourses, important events connected with GB,
possibilities of partnerships in GB Initiatives as well as grant
opportunities and other information you will consider relevant.
Additional information on gender budget can be found on NEWW-Polska
website: www.neww.org.pl

NEWW-Polska hopes
that you will actively participate in creating “CEE/CIS Gender
Budget mailing list” and together we will manage to create a
Network, which will succeed in introducing GB Initiatives in the CEE
and former Soviet Union region. We hope that you will find this
service useful and we welcome your comments and suggestions.

With warm regards

Malgorzata Tarasiewicz

NEWW-Polska Director
& Zofia Lapniewska
NEWW-Polska
researcher and mailing list moderator.