For women and with women!
Amasra municipality in Turkey is clearly making a statement for gender equality. – We don’t accept any discrimination or violence against women in our city says, Recai Çakır, the Mayor of Amasra.
The mayor himself, the vice mayor Meltem Öz, Birgül Çay, and Ayşe Kaşıkırık from an NGO, constitute the team of Amasra in ICLD’s programme Human Rights Based Approach. The team has chosen to implement gender-responsive budgeting in Amasra municipality as a strategic instrument for achieving a more gender-equal and inclusive local administration for all, especially for vulnerable groups. The objective is that a gender perspective should systematically be included in all steps of the budget process to ensure that the municipality’s resources can be distributed to promote gender equality.
The mayor of the small port town situated next to the Black sea, Recai Çakır, has one daughter, and he wants her to live in a society where women have the same rights and possibilities as men.
– Our municipality strives to have more women in leading positions. At the moment, five out of nine department leaders are women, he says.
Also, Amasra municipality signed the European Charter for the equality of women and men in local life on 25 November 2022. The signing ceremony was attended by the Mayor and Deputy Mayor, Municipality staff, representatives of the Municipality Council, and civil society.
The ICLD project
Some of the activities that Team Amasra will conduct within the scope of their project are to enhance awareness and knowledge about gender-responsive budgeting among high-level managers, conduct workshops on gender-responsive planning and budgeting to the municipality staff, provide managers and staff with gender statistics and analysis’s, make the gender-responsive approach more transparent on the municipality website, create structures for the exchange of experience on gender budgeting and actively promote the dissemination of relevant resources, tools, and lessons on gender budgeting to other municipalities.
Read more about ICLD’s programme “Human Rights Based Approach”.