24th - 25th February 2014,
Penang, Malaysia
GRB enables communities to identify and help meet the different needs of different people within the community.
The GRB team works with communities and with local authorities, to help bring them together to ensure different needs of different people are identified and met.
The Penang State government and the two municipal councils (MPPP and MPSP) in Penang are supporting the GRB project. Their involvement and commitment are essential to success.
GRB And The World
GRB has emerged out of initiatives advocated especially by UN agencies led by UNIFEM in the 1990s. By 2010, UN Women was working on GRB projects with some 45 countries.
Many of these projects are ‘technical’ in nature, where it is advocated that change can come with a change of data recording and collection and gender sensitisation of government officers. Many of the reports, evaluations, advocacy documents, training manuals, and leaflets on GRB reflect this.
A different approach to GRB is to emphasise the need to change the relationship between those in government and those ‘being governed’, where empowerment of communities, women and men, in the budgeting process is seen as crucial. This is the approach the project in Penang is taking. GRB then aims to change the process of governing as well as continue to advocate the need to monitor impact of services through appropriate data collection and analysis.
There are many resources on GRB, including lots of free downloads. One place to start is www.gender-budgets.org
