Promoting women’s leadership in the Public Administration: the UfM alongside the Réseau Mixité et Gouvernance
Barcelona, 29 May 2015. Over the last year, the Réseau Mixité et Gouvernance has brought together women who hold senior positions within the civil service and the public sectors of various countries of the Mediterranean, with representatives from Egypt, France, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Slovenia and Tunisia.
It has two main goals:
- To promote the position and the role of women in the civil service of these nations;
- To be a driver of proposals for the State and for public policy.
The Barcelona meeting is the follow-up to a seminar held in Beirut in November 2014, hosted by the Basil Fuleihan Institute of Finance. The network had been launched in Rabat in May 2014 at the Moroccan Finance Ministry’s Centre of Excellence for Gender Budgeting.
In Barcelona, the members of the network discussed the values and the issues behind the rebuilding of the Mediterranean area and actions that can be proposed from the perspective of gender rights and equality.
The gender-based inequalities and the related issue of stereotyping were highlighted as weighing on the relevance of the public policies and on the efficiency of their implementation in Mediterranean, both socially and generally. It was also pointed out that the development of national gender budgeting practices was of great importance and should be rolled out on a region-wide level. In addition, the Network decided to work on issues relating to training.”.
During the course of this meeting, the network also formalised its system of governance. The next regional meeting will be held in Tunis in November 2015.
The UfM Secretariat is a supporter of this innovative regional initiative, along with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Expertise France agency. The Secretariat plays an active role in strengthening synergies, consistency and complementarity between all the actors involved, in order to further women’s emancipation in the Mediterranean region.