OREANDA-NEWS. January 30, 2013. The Ministry of Finance of Ukraine held final workshop on Gender-Focused Local Budgeting. The event involved Ministry of Finance employees, Swedish and Austrian leading area experts, domestic and international scientists, and officials of Luhansk and Ivano-Frankivsk regional administrations.

The Gender-Focused Local Budgeting in Ukraine project used to be implemented in Ivano-Frankivsk and Luhansk regions supported by the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) and relevant regional state administrations.

Throughout the project and sharing experience of integrating social aspects into planning and budgeting processes Ukraine has acquired deep knowledge thereof, and the pilot largely helped developing national experience and potential approaches to gender focused budgeting.

Local gender focused budgeting project in Ukraine has contributed to creating practical tools and gaining regional experience. The gender budget analysis was under selected regional programs, namely youth and education program in Ivano-Frankivsk region and physical culture and sporting program in Luhansk region. The project’s aim was to popularize gender focused budgeting in Ukraine and to demonstrate its potential implementation approaches.

Gender focused budgeting overall implementation could:

- Raise the quality of dealing with public finances;
- Improve effectiveness and efficiency;
- Improve financial resource distribution;
- Uphold effective management and  high-quality services;
- Support reaching goals of gender equality and  human potential development;
- Monitor achieving political goals including gender equality security;
- Increase transparency and accountability and public involvement in planning and implementing budgets.

Integrating social aspects into planning and budgeting processes is a new and innovative contribution to further development of the result-driven budgeting concept. The said concept is supported, specifically, by the EU, Council of Europe and the World Bank as a means to focus on the effect of public strategies and financing. Luhansk and Ivano-Frankivsk region have been leaders in the gender focused budgeting analysis development in Ukraine.

Thus, gained experience and tools will support improving local budget process planning and improving the public resource application in view of achieving gender equality, thereby making budget expenditure more effective and efficient.