Building Capacity for Gender Monitoring in Kosovo

1
Building Capacity for Gender Monitoring in Kosovo

• Gender Equality and the Millennium Development
  Goals
• November 19-20, 2003

2
Objective of the exercise

• To deepen the analysis of current gender issues
  in the country
• To institutionalize systematic monitoring of
  future developments
• To raise gender awareness and place gender on
  development agenda
• To set up institutions and mechanisms
  accountable for mainstreaming gender into
  policy making.

3
Intended Actions

• Improve gender indicators and gender
  disaggregated statistics
• Assist local experts in carrying out qualitative
  research aimed at supplementing the quantitative
  data collected through KOS activities
• Assist KOS in the production of a statistical
  bulletin on men and women in Kosovo
• Help the Kosovo government to set monitorable
  targets
• Put in place the institution set-up for
  monitoring progress.

4
What are the key issues (1)?

• Government is committed to gender equality
• Access to data is relatively good
• BUT
• Gender disaggregated statistics not calculated
  on a regular basis
• Information on priority gender issues limited
• Existing information dose not feed into policy
  making.

5
What are the key issues (2)?

• Men and women experience differential access to
  public services
• About 29 of rural girls complete secondary
  school, compared with about 61 of boys
• Exact figures are unknown but Kosovo appears to
  have the highest infant mortality rates in
  Europe
• Maternal Mortality is high compared with the
  region
• Men account for about 88 of the private sector
  employment and a large proportion of discouraged
  workers are women

6
What are the missing pieces?

• Some basis gender indicators.
• Understanding of why males and females experience
  differential access to public services
• Ie, are perceptions of satisfaction different?
• Feeding information into policy making.
• Developing short-term and medium- term targets
  and choosing relevant impact and output
  indicators.

7
Existing Institutions (1) Government

• Inter-ministerial committee (Prime Minister
  level)
• Gender affairs office of UN provisional
  Government
• Gender-equality Commission of the Kosovo
  Assembly
• Drafted Law on Equal Opportunity.
• Gender municipal officers (reporting to
  inter-ministerial committee)
• ?Gender equality is a government priority.

8
Existing Institutions (2) Civil Societies

• An active NGO community exists
• An umbrella womens NGO group meets regularly and
  is facilitated by UNIFEM
• A business-womens network exists within Kosovo .
• ? participatory monitory could be easily
  incorporated into gender monitoring system.

9
Data Collection (1) Household data

• Statistical Office of Kosovo (SOK) administers
  on a regular basis two surveys that are useful
  for tracking gender outcomes
• Household Budget Survey
• Labor Force Survey.
• In addition the Demographic and Health Survey has
  been administered occasionally.
• However no gender disaggregated statistics are
  generated.

10
Data Collection (1) Institutional

• School-level data tracked by the Ministry of
  Education
•  Morbidity and mortality statistics tracked by
  the Ministry of Health
•   Registry on unemployed kept by labor offices.
• Statistics not available by gender.

11
Main Challenges

• Make the institutions, the data providers, the
  other policy makers, the civil societies and the
  donors MEET
• Institutionalize use of gender disaggregated data
  in policy making
• Acquire qualitative information on issues not
  covered by existing data collection.

12
Ways Forward

• Build the capacity of the Inter-ministerial
  committee and institutionalize its role as
  monitoring institution
• Increase the exchange of information between the
  committee, the UNMIK Gender affairs office and
  KOS
• Increase data collection capacity of gender
  municipal officers (reporting to
  inter-ministerial committee)
• Establish a participatory monitoring system
• Increase capacity to analyze statistics
• Coordinate donors action

13
Many of these steps are already underway!