Partnership agreement with the Kosovo Agency for Gender Equality

There are many challenges in the area of gender equality in Kosovo, particularly regarding violence against women, economic inequality, and uneven distribution of power and influence. Legislation is often in place, but enforcement is weak, and support for gender equality efforts and the agency itself needs to be strengthened.

“We received a request from KAGE through the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Sida, which has previously supported KAGE with technical experts. Now KAGE specifically requested a partnership with us to benefit from our knowledge and experience” says Anna Sundström, project manager at the Swedish Gender Equality Agency.

Cooperation focusing institutional capacity development

In particular,  KAGE has identified needs to develop better statistics and monitoring, as well as support to and coordination with other agencies and societal actors. The new partnership programme focuses on institutional capacity development covering three components focusing on gender mainstreaming, strategic communication and coordination, and statistics and data.

“Each project component will have working groups consisting of staff from both our agency and KAGE. These working groups will jointly plan the workshops and training sessions to be conducted throughout the project. We plan to start up the working groups in late autumn with a visit from KAGE to Gothenburg”, says Anna Sundström.

Anna Sundström, who will be coordinating the working groups, is looking forward to gain insights from KAGE's experiences, which is particularly relevant to our own assignment on women, peace, and security.

“I am also looking forward to integrating the international work with the other work of the agency. Although this may be a new assignment for our agency, we should not view it as a separate activity. Only through joint efforts and by leveraging the synergies that arise will we achieve the good results we have planned for. It is also an opportunity to further establish our agency as an actor in international development cooperation."

The plan is to initiate a similar collaboration with the Gender Equality Agencies in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the autumn. 

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