Gender-Responsive Budgeting — North Macedonia's Decade-Long Institutionalisation Across Government

The Law on Equal Opportunities of Women and Men (2012) required central and local governments to integrate gender-equality objectives into strategic plans and budgets, and to track the differentiated impact of programmes on women and men.
Since 2014, the Ministry of Finance's annual Budget Circular has carried gender-specific obligations for budget users; reforms to strategic-planning methodology now require every line ministry to include at least one gender-sensitive indicator and a gender-impact analysis. In 2021 the Ministry engendered the national Citizen's Budget for the first time.
A UN Women-supported programme running since 2018 (funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and Swedish Sida) strengthened ministry and municipal capacity; in March 2022 this produced the Resource Centre on Gender-Responsive Policymaking and Budgeting, described by UN partners as the first GRB knowledge hub in the country and region. The National Strategy on Gender Equality 2022–2026 (adopted September 2021) formalised GRB as a core mainstreaming tool.
North Macedonia's ex-ante gender analyses are cited regionally as good practice, and the country hosted a study visit from a Moroccan GRB delegation; but UN sources caution that political will and technical capacity — not the legal framework alone — determine whether resource allocation actually shifts. No independent quantitative evaluation of gender-equality outcomes (as opposed to process indicators) was found.

Read the full analysis: https://northmacedonia.un.org/en/211585-gender-responsive-policies-%E2%80%93-good-practices-and-challenges-region