Women and Citizen Participation: Contributions to Development, Gender Equality and Governance from Volunteerism

Since the late nineties, UN Women - the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (formerly UNIFEM) - drives various initiatives of gender responsive budgets with the support of important allies, such as the Spanish government and the Basque government, seeking to strengthen democratic governance and the enjoyment of women’s economic and social rights.

In October 2005, the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme joined this proposal, under the common understanding of the need to promote women’s skills and abilities to engage in political and economic processes, through the recognition and appreciation of their voluntary cooperation, understood as a commitment to women themselves as subjects of political action and welfare precursors in their own socioeconomic and cultural context to increase, among other things, their influence in decision-making and recognition of their social actions.

This publication aims to visualize and illustrate the concept of volunteering for development in gender budget initiatives implemented within the joint UNV-UN Women programme “Gender Responsive Budgeting: making the voluntary contributions of women to development visible in Latin America”.