Natia Ghvinashvili, Deputy Executive Director of the National Association of Local Authorities of Georgia, National Coordinator and Expert at CEMR, and Coordinator of the project “Gender Policy Localization,” participated in the working meeting of the Interagency Commission on Gender Equality, Violence against Women and Domestic Violence of the Human Rights Interagency Council of the Government Administration of Georgia.
The online event, organized to strengthen coordination between central and local authorities in the areas of human rights and gender equality, was led by the Prime Minister’s Advisor on Human Rights.
Niko Tatulashvili reviewed the Council’s main priorities and discussed the current situation, challenges, and future plans with representatives of partner organizations.
Natia Ghvinashvili provided information about NALAG’s activities to the audience and emphasized one of the organization’s main directions – promoting gender equality and policy localization in member municipalities.
According to the Association’s representative, NALAG, with the support of UN Women and the Norwegian government, developed a recommendatory manual for developing, monitoring, and evaluating municipal gender equality action plans, which will help self-governing units establish documents based on nationally and internationally recognized principles and standards and address local challenges.
“Our approach to this issue is that municipal gender equality action plans should be based on the municipality’s development strategy and respond to the goals and objectives of gender equality and women’s empowerment declared therein. “This essentially means that gender equality principles will be prioritized not in some separate additional document of the municipality, but in the main development document of the municipality, which we believe will be a very important and progressive step,” stated Natia Ghvinashvili.
The NALAG representative also addressed the topic of fulfilling Georgia’s international obligations and introduced the organization’s activities in the direction of gender equality to the meeting participants.
“Since the creation of our gender equality platform within our organization, we have become even more active in working in this direction. “For the second year now, we are implementing the project ‘Gender Policy Localization’ together with UN Women, through which we have introduced the principles of the European Charter to representatives of all municipalities. “The subsequent steps were implemented gradually, and through our advocacy, the document now has 21 signatory municipalities from Georgia,” stated Natia Ghvinashvili.
On the same day, participants of the working meeting received information about future cooperation plans with the central government within the framework of the Council of Europe’s new project, after which the event moved to a discussion format.
Along with progress, municipality representatives also discussed existing challenges in this direction and presented their own proposals for overcoming them.
The working meeting was summarized by Niko Tatulashvili. The Prime Minister’s Advisor announced the Coordination Council’s priorities and expressed hope for even closer cooperation with event participants.
