Adva Center - Gender Responsive Budgeting

Gender Responsive Budgeting

The Adva Center leads the Women's Budget Forum, a coalition of over 30 feminist and human rights organizations in Israel promoting social policies that contribute to the advancement of women and girls through gender mainstreaming and gender-sensitive budgeting. In 2011, the Women's Budget Forum conducted nine courses in social economics and influencing the local budget for groups of women from all around Israel. Final projects completed during these courses often examine areas of gender inequality, particularly the representation of women in various positions and the terms of their employment. Among other responses:

• Local sports programs were altered in Herzliya to provide more opportunities for girls;
• The towns of Beit Dagan (Jewish) and Arrabe (Arab) approved a budget for activities designed to promote the status of women in the community - for the first time;
• In the city of Be'ersheba more women were appointed to municipal committees;
• The municipality of Tel Aviv set up a committee to find ways of raising the status of women employed by the city.

As part of its gender work, the Adva Center drew up a policy document on the need for gender mainstreaming within the departments of the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor. The minister has since instructed the director of his Research Department to submit a plan for collecting data by gender for the purpose of promoting women's employment. In addition, the Adva Center worked with other women's organizations to:

• Convince the Knesset not to raise the retirement age for women by 2–5 years. An Adva staff person wrote an influential position paper on the issue and testified at two public hearings.
• Monitor monies allocated to public day care. At the end of 2011 the monitors found that no funding had been spent and that no new day care facilities had been constructed.
• Host Swedish gender expert Gertrude Astrom and arrange for her to appear at a Knesset conference on the gender mainstreaming of local budgets, as well as appearances before the Israel Ministry of FInance and the National Insurance Institute.