Today in Kraljevo, there was a workshop held organised by the Association of Businesswomen of Serbia and WPN. The topic of the workshop was gender disaggregated statistical data collection on local, small and micro enterprises, establishing of a fund for support to women’s entrepreneurship and self-employment, and participation of women in supply chains.
The project „Introducing Gender Sensitive Economic Management at the Local Level“ was implemented with the support of Canadian Embassy. Kraljevo was the first of three cities in Serbia in which such workshops were organised. Their ultimate goal was to create new jobs for women in Kraljevo, Vranje, and Zrenjanin.
The workshop was aimed at municipal assembly members interested in the activities of the WPN. The cities that participated in the project were selected according to the criteria of their progress in the implementation of various gender-sensitive initiatives, their level of development of women’s entrepreneurship and their capacity to implement at least one out of three defined support measures.
In her opening speech, Marija Obradović, Coordinator of WPN, underlined the importance of having gender sensitive local budgets, stating that the next most important step would be to adopt the indicators for next year’s national budget that would show how much money from the budget went to men, and how much to women.
„The women MPs and municipal assembly members have to be much louder from now on. They must ask that more money from the budget goes to women entrepreneurs, women scientists, women working in agriculture,“ Ms. Obradović said, clarifying that this did not mean spending more money than until now, but a fairer redistribution of the existing funds. Lidija Pavlović, Head of the Gender Equality Council, assessed that today’s workshop was extremely important for the Women’s Network of the Municipal Assembly of Kraljevo, which had been established slightly more than one month ago. The workshop would help the women municipal assembly members to understand the importance of gender budgeting and grasp their own role in the local assembly.
„Next year, we will work on a project for economic empowerment of women. We will organise workshops for women entrepreneurs and rural women, we will help them create networks, we will listen about their problems and find ways how to solve them at the local level,“ Ms. Pavlović announced.
The expected result of this project was the introduction of the gender initiative to support women’s entrepreneurship at the local level.
Support to women’s entrepreneurship
