Inclusive Governance: Politicians United for Gender Equality

The project can be viewed as seeking to intervene in three ways: through awareness raising and advocacy, capacity building and development of policies. 

It will involve a regional event organized with the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) serving to discuss the role of men in gender equality and the allyship of men and women in politics to address gender-based violence and result in a number of proposed actions developed for engagement of men. Furthermore, a side meeting will be organized under the auspices of the regional event with presidents of women’s forums of political parties to discuss and agree on principles for engagement to end violence against women, which will become central to the Mission’s co-operation with legislative and executive bodies at Cantonal, City and Municipal levels, as well as in Brcko District BiH (BD). Legislative bodies for gender equality, human rights and other relevant topics will receive training from the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina (Mission) to strengthen their oversight function against the executive power and demand for the development and implementation of gender equality policies and improvement in the response to gender-based violence. Through partnership with executive functions, such as prime ministers, Mayors and representatives of Ministries, City/Municipal administrations, the Mission will create networks for the implementation of the principles to combat gender-based violence. 

The Mission is well placed to conduct such activities, given its ten years of work with political parties on gender equality and women’s participation. This line of work of the Mission started in 2014 with a Gender Equality Pledge for political parties, only to continue even more concretely in 2017 with the development of gender audits for the eight largest parties at the time. In the period since 2017, most of the Mission’s focus has been to support these parties in implementing their respective gender audit recommendations. This support has resulted in a number of parties which have made changes to their Statute and internal regulations to either introduce or increase quotas for women, capacity building on gender equality through parties’ political academies, introducing other measures which support increased participation of women in party structures, or call for parity in the party’s election list, as well as strengthening the position of women’s forums.