Participate loudly and demand! A local campaign for women-led local initiatives

In April 2022, two local partner organisations UN Women gender-responsive budgeting project - National Council for Gender Equality Macedonia and AGORA, launched a campaign to share best practices and results achieved under the “Participate loudly and demand!” initiative.

The “Participate loudly and demand!” initiative supports local CSOs to carry out empowerment actions aimed at mobilizing women to take active part in the local community activities, to articulate their needs and priorities in consultations and planning of municipal policies and budgets, through the existing mechanisms for participatory processes.

Working groups for prioritizing needs of women in the local communities discovered that a clean environment, better and safer transportation services, and improved cultural, educational and recreational amenities locally were ranked among the most pressing needs of women from selected local communities. 

Despite the number of challenges to implement outreach activities during the pandemic and in the middle of local elections, excellent results were achieved: more than 10 initiatives in 4 municipalities were submitted and advocated for, 11 initiative groups were formed and women CSO’s expanded their outreach to new localities which will help them increase their constituency of support.

As a wrap-up of the locally-led initiatives, a number of women-advocates share their voice and best practices from the initiative.



Video available here.