Kosovo's Legal Mandate for Gender-Responsive Budgeting — Institutionalisation and Its Limits

The Kosovo Women's Network (KWN) began advocating for gender-responsive budgeting with GIZ support in 2013. In 2014 the Ministry of Finance wrote GRB guidelines into the annual Budget Circular, obliging ministries and municipalities to report planned and actual beneficiaries of expenditure disaggregated by sex.
Article 5 of Law No. 05/L-020 on Gender Equality, gazetted 26 June 2015, turned GRB into a binding obligation for all public institutions after sustained advocacy by KWN and the Agency for Gender Equality.
KWN directly supported gender-budget analysis in six central ministries (Labour and Social Welfare, Education, Trade and Industry, Environment and Spatial Planning, Agriculture/Forestry/Rural Development, Diaspora) and four municipalities (Kamenica, Gjakova, Hani i Elezit, Prishtina); its training curriculum was subsequently adopted by the Kosovo Institute for Public Administration and the Agency for Gender Equality as standard practice. In November 2022, 15 further municipalities signed memoranda with UN Women to extend GRB, part of a Sida-funded programme. One documented local effect: Dragash municipality began running a free bus so rural women could reach public budget-consultation meetings, which local officials linked to a noticeable rise in women's attendance.
Reporting by Balkan Insight (May 2026) found that, more than a decade after the legal mandate, gender-responsive budgeting "rarely shapes spending" in practice — a gap KWN's own recap of GRB milestones attributes to weak gender-disaggregated data, limited institutional capacity and inconsistent political will. This practice is included as a candid example of a strong legal framework whose implementation still falls short of its aims.

Read the full analysis: https://kosovoteam.un.org/en/205809-advancing-gender-responsive-budgeting