Gender mainstreaming, employment and youth - SLOVENIA
Slovenia attaches great importance to the gender equality and empowerment of women as one of our foreign and domestic policy priorities. Strong engagement of the line ministry and Slovenian experts in international activities is led by national programme for equal opportunities for women and men for the period 2015–20.
Slovenian priority of women empowerment in development cooperation is set in the Resolution on International Development Cooperation of the Republic of Slovenia for the period until 2015 and remains in force until the adoption of the new Resolution. In the context of the Agenda 2030, Slovenia is drafting a new Resolution where thematic priorities are set in line with the SDG targets. In the new resolution, priorities are set wider, and gender equality falls under equal opportunities. New Strategy, following the adoption of the Resolution in mid-2017, will narrow down the set of priorities and gender equality will certainly remain one of them.
New Guidelines on Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment in Development Cooperation will support the Resolution in that respect. They will be further harmonized with the Agenda 2030 and the Gender Action Plan II, adopted by the European Commission. The guidelines are a strategic document to promote gender equality in developing countries in line with their national priorities, capacities, and Slovenia's know-how. Priority areas were set in the process of coordination with relevant experts from the state and local governments, civil society and the private sector. The expert knowledge was in discussion with the diplomatic network set against the needs of partner countries. The result is an intersection of both and represents the basis for the following priority areas, namely the economic empowerment and employment of women, engagement in decision making, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and addressing the violence against women and girls.
Slovenia also mainstreams gender equality into public tenders for NGOs as the cross-cutting issue. The October 2016 tender explicitly set the strengthening of the role of women and girls as the selection criterion. Eight projects out of selected eleven deal with gender equality and women empowerment. Furthermore, to encourage institutions that are financed by the Government to introduce gender equality as a cross-cutting issue into their projects, we prepared new application forms where they are obliged to explain how individual project contributes to the strengthening of gender equality. The same was included in their reporting forms.