November 05, 2006	Sunday	Shawwal 12, 1427

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ISLAMABAD, Nov 4: A two-day workshop, which concluded here on Saturday, has stressed on the government to take gender responsive initiatives to provide equal opportunities of development to women.

Gender Responsive Budgeting Initiative (GBRI) had organized the workshop. GRBI is a two-year pilot project of the ministry of finance being implemented with technical and financial support of UNDP and its cost sharing donors, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and the Royal Norwegian Embassy.

Each year, the budget wings of the Federal Finance Division and the Punjab Finance Department issue a Medium-Term Budget Framework (MTBF) budget call circular to ministries/departments to draw up their budget for the following three financial years on the prescribed forms.

This year Punjab’s MTBF has included gender perspective in its guidelines and instructions while the federal MTBF (issued in November every year) is going to include gender sensitive amendments as approved in principle by the budget wing of the Finance Division through the efforts of GRBI project, states an official announcement.

These steps are part of the on-going efforts of the government to engender the government’s budgetary forms and procedures with the overall objective of ensuring gender sensitive resource allocations.

The workshop was inaugurated by Ahmad Farooq, national project director GRBI and joint secretary ministry of finance. He elaborated that the government was working on multiple levels for reducing gender gaps.