WUNRN
European Women's Lobby
[IPS,
Immediately after the fall of
communism in 1989, Central and Eastern European (CEE) NGOs working on gender
equality got most of their funding from U.S. or Western European private
foundations or governmental agencies; following these countries’ entry to the
EU, non-EU donors withdrew considering the region well covered by EU funds.
CEE NGOs, however, noted that
following EU accession, it has become ironically more difficult to access
funding, primarily because EU funds must generally be co-financed from national
budgets and also get distributed according to priorities set at the national
level. As a consequence, NGOs find themselves limited by their governments’
agendas that are not always progressive.
"Before EU accession it was
paradoxically easier to get money for more radical actions and
publications," says Alina Synakiewicz from Polish NGO Feminoteka.
"Now, even though money is available, it is given out via governmental
intermediation, meaning that the government channels it the way it wants."
In the best case, NGOs "get
creative" and manage to fit their priorities into the governmental agenda;
in the worst, they are simply denied funding for themes deemed unacceptable.
The most striking example of such
marginalisation of a core gender equality theme as a result of a conservative
national agenda concerns reproductive rights in
Last year, activists attempted to
introduce a reproductive rights bill in the parliament, having as main points
the legalisation of abortion, making contraceptives affordable and more
accessible, introducing fact-based sexual education in schools, and state
support for in-vitro fertilisation.
Their effort to gather the
100,000 signatures needed to bring the civic law proposal into the legislative
failed because of a media blackout on the initiative alongside a lack of funds
and help for the activists. Even some NGOs working on women’s issues steered
away from supporting this effort as they did not trust the initiative can
succeed.
"What has unfortunately
changed in the last 20 years in
And, across CEE, gender equality
activists are winning battles every day regardless of resistance or
indifference from national authorities.
Some of the most difficult themes
to address across the region over the past two decades have been violence
against women and domestic violence. Funding from national sources remains
scarce for groups working on violence against women which results not only in
limited NGO capacity – highly problematic considering that it is NGOs that do
most of the work on this issue — but also in an insufficient number of shelters
for victims of violence.
Legislation regarding domestic
violence has also advanced with fits and starts. Most CEE countries have passed
such laws, yet often the texts lacked provisions for imposing restraining
orders on the aggressors; arguably, this reluctance has to do with a
"sanctification" of private property across the region after 1989 and
hence an unwillingness to take men (usually the aggressors) out of their homes
(of which often they are the owners).
But this week (Feb. 28),
following over two years of intense campaigning by NGOs, the Romanian
parliament finally introduced an amendment in the national legislation
regulating the use of restraining orders against the perpetrators of domestic
violence.
Two years back, Cristina Horia
from Sensiblu Foundation, one of the main groups working on domestic violence
in Romania and organiser of a strong public campaign on the theme in 2009, was
telling IPS that "the involvement of state institutions with the issue of
domestic violence is limited, being at most supporters and partners, but not
initiating campaigns."
Over the past two years, Horia
says, national and local authorities have improved their attitudes, yet
"systematic gaps" continue to prevent a proper engagement with
domestic violence.
Among these gaps, Horia lists
"the under-financing of the social assistance system, the insufficient
number of shelters for battered women, the lack of a national strategy to
address domestic violence, the authorities’ failing to assume the role of
protecting victims and to implement measures to punish aggressors, insufficient
training of the police and public services staff to deal competently with
victims and aggressors."
There is a sense that NGOs active
in CEE are operating in quite a different reality than that described by their
national authorities in reports to international bodies, full of good
intentions and commitments to gender equality.
A possible test of this statement
could be to look at how one of the most advanced gender mainstreaming tools
proposed by the UN, gender budgeting, fares in the region. Gender budgeting
means analysing and transforming national and local budgets in such a way that
they allow for the advancement of women or at least that obstacles to gender equality
are eliminated. It does not mean giving more money for women, but rather, using
existing resources more cleverly.
According to economist Elizabeth
Villagomez, who has worked for years with various UN agencies on training and
assessing possibilities of introducing this tool in CEE, "gender budgeting
is not strong in these countries because the idea and principles of gender
equality are still weak there; in former communist countries, the idea of
equality as a value in general, including when it comes to gender, is not yet
very much welcomed or still misunderstood because of the recent socialist
past."
Gender budgeting has been
attempted in several places across the region, from municipalities in Poland (Gdansk)
and Albania (Elbasan), to the national level in the Czech Republic, but its
implementation remains patchy and has not brought the results seen in the West.
Villagomez adds another reason for this lack of success: "using gender
budgeting depends on the real capacities of governments to use results-based
budget management and also on how the political priorities reflected in the
budgets are set."