UN Women and Ministry of Defence continue their cooperation
Date:
UN Women and the Ministry of Defence of Georgia (MoD) are continuing their cooperation towards the integration of a gender perspective in the MoD. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed by Tamar Sabedashvili, UN Women Georgia Country Representative a.i., and Grigol Giorgadze, Deputy Minister of Defence of Georgia.
Within the framework of the MoU, new initiatives are planned, namely that UN Women will provide technical support to the MoD to conduct a Participatory Gender Audit, to strengthen the sex-disaggregated data collection and analysis system and to raise awareness towards this end and further mainstream gender through the Gender and Security Toolkit jointly developed by DCAF - Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance, the OSCE/ODIHR and UN Women. “We have had successes and achieved progress towards gender equality. And naturally, there is still a lot of work ahead of us,” said Mr. Giorgadze while signing the memorandum. Ms. Sabedashvili noted that fulfilling the Women, Peace and Security agenda and mainstreaming gender in the MoD system will be the priority area of this cooperation.
The MoD has achieved significant progress in strengthening gender equality and working towards the implementation of the national commitments under the National Action Plan on the Implementation of the UN Security Council Resolutions on Women, Peace and Security. The MoD regularly organizes trainings of gender advisers for its staff and its Defence Forces, as well as conducts activities related to the improvement of the sexual harassment complaints mechanism and systematizes gender in its military education and pre-deployment programmes for international peacekeeping missions.
The memorandum was signed within the framework of the UN Women project “Accelerating Implementation of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda in Georgia”, generously funded by the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund of the British Government.