The central public authorities do not have institutional capacities to mainstream the gender dimension into the designing and budgeting of public policies in the field of disability. The gender analysis is not used in the process of budgeting measures for the social inclusion of persons with disabilities, while the planned budgets do not cover their implementation. At the same time, there are no programs for teaching key figures of the central and local public authorities about the process of budgeting policies on the social protection and accessibility of the persons with disabilities from the gender perspective. These are some of the findings of the Alliance of Organizations for Persons with Disabilities that analyzed the measures for the social protection and accessibility of persons with disabilities from the perspective of gender sensitive budgeting.
In a news conference at IPN, the Alliance’s executive director Galina Climov said the goal of the analysis was to promote the policies and budgets allocated for persons with disabilities by mainstreaming the gender dimension so as to ensure equal opportunities free from discrimination for persons with disabilities. This way, there were analyzed policy documents, the objectives set by the authorities, the actions and their implementation level.
“There is no mechanism for ensuring the transfer of powers and responsibilities after the approval of new policy documents for all the central and local public authorities that are responsible for their implementation and there is no mechanism of continuous training for persons responsible for the collection of data for the indicators set down in the policy documents,” stated Galina Climov.
According to her, the process of budgeting policies concerning the target group – the persons with disabilities – is sporadic, uninform and does not take into account particular reference indicators and indicators planned for particular periods. This hampers the measuring of the efficiency, sustainability and impact of policies. The absence of statistical data about the social-demographic profile of persons with disabilities hinders the thinking up of reference indicators and indicators planned to be achieved after the policies are implemented by dividing the data according to sex, age groups, environment, types of disability. As there is no such separate data, gender equality cannot be addressed in the budgeting process.
The analysis report forms part of the Alliance of Organizations for Persons with Disabilities’ research conducted during February 1 – November 30, 2021 and is part of the project “GBWN - Gender Budget Watchdog Network in Western Balkans and Republic of Moldova” that is implemented by Keystone Moldova with financial support from the Austrian Development Agency and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency.
Ludmila Ciocan GBWN project coordinator at Keystone Moldova, told the same news conference that the project was initiated by sevens organizations from Moldova and another six countries. “We created this project because we wanted to develop a regional platform with capacities to increase transparency of budget processes and to ensure gender equality at the level of region. This project was conceived because the budgeting processes in Western Balkans and the Republic of Moldova are not always transparent enough and not always the resources are distributed equitably to ensure opportunities for the women and men to participate in the political and economic life,” stated Ludmila Ciocan.
According to her, given the wide gender gaps seen in different areas, they aimed to empower the civil society organizations so that the people are engaged more in the working out of public policies and primarily in the process of budgeting these policies.
