​Participants of this workshop shared experiences how SDC can work with women’s civil society organisations (CSO’s) in order to promote women’s empowerment and how this work can be financed. A short introduction by HO gave an overview on different ways of resource mobilization and financing for gender equality. The field of macro-economic, which offers a wide range of instruments such as gender-just tax systems or gender-responsive national resource-allocation, could not be treated in more detail in the workshop.  Rather, the workshop aimed at discussing modalities of gender-responsive budgeting on local and community level, through participative approaches and inclusive local governance. COOF Burkina Faso presented the good practice of the ‘Fond Commun Genre’. This is a fund where partners put their resources together and finance representative women’s CSO’s. COOF Western Balkan shared their experiences with gender-responsive programming and budgeting in Macedonia at the municipal and central level in collaboration with UN Women. In the discussion participants named the lack of capacities and political will as being the main problem in funding women’s CSO’s and they mentioned the importance of capacity building, monitoring, a long-term approach and cooperation with constituency-based CSO’s as key recommendations. The workshop’s discussion – as well as a consultation of all COOFs previous to the F2F - showed that  direct financing of women’s CSO’s could be a strategy to be exploited more systematically by SDC. For promoting gender-responsive budgeting participants mentioned how important it is to bring government on board and raise aware-ness and they further highlighted the need for accountability, participation and capacity building.

Thematic introduction: Resource mobilisation and financing for gender equality, SDC Summary Report for Women's CSO's
Further information: Sarah Koch

Burkina Faso: An example for a financing mechanism: Le Fond Commun Genre de Burkina
Further information: Habibou Koanda

Macedonia: An example for gender-budgeting – it works!
Further information: Kristina Kolozova-Antoviky

Findings from the discussion: Funding women’s CSO‘s, Solutions & examples, Key recommendations for funding women’s CSO’s, Promoting gender-budgeting, Strengthening gender-sensitive public finance management, Key recommendations for promoting GRB, Workshop outcomes

Video statement: Burkina Faso (Habibou Koanda)