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Galdakao and Gender equality – Women’s participation in local life

On a devoted website the municipality of Galdakao in the Basque country presents the activities carried out in the municipality to promote gender equality (to visit website click here).

An initiative taken by the municipality is to make a publication on the place of women in the history of Galdakao, (to access the publication please click on the following link).

The municipality of Galdakao has also done a Mobility and accessibility-study to identify specific needs of women in terms of mobility and design of urban spaces.

Background for making the study: Women are in general more frequent among pedestrians and use more often public transports. Moreover, women work to a larger extent in care-related professions (such as schools and hospitals) and visit commercial zones. They therefore depend, to a higher extent than men, on public transports to access these zones. Furthermore, women are also more likely to become victims of gender-based violence.

Based on these facts, the municipality of Galdakao took the initiative to carry out a public hearing with women from different age groups coming from different neighbourhood. In total 70 women from 9 neighbourhoods participated in the consultation and were invited to provide their input and suggestions on how to improve accessibility, public transport, services and the design of urban spaces.

Based on the comments from the study-panels, the municipality drafted a report. Some of the main conclusions drawn from the project were:

• Public transport: Change, increase or renovate certain bus stops, especially in underground zones, extend the timetable to provide bus transports by night to bigger cities, extend the offer of public transport between neighbourhoods, make sure all public transport provide a platform for strollers
• Lightening: Lack of lightening in urban zones created a feeling of insecurity, it was proposed that the municipality should increase the level of lightening in certain areas
• Green areas: Increase public meeting spaces such as parks and green areas
• Difficulties in accessibility: such as stairways, which especially have made it difficult for older women to move freely and also for women with strollers
• Promotion of small businesses: Almost all women participating in the project underlined the importance of promoting and protecting small business in order to keep the neighborhoods alive, despite the structural changes that have benefitted large commercial stores outside of towns, the women called for local policies encoring small businesses in neighborhoods.

The municipality of Galdakao has also elaborated their second Action plan for the period 2014-2017. One of the main priorities of this plan is to include a gender perspective in the functioning of all the Municipality’s departments (regarding budgets, language, equal representation, disaggregated data etc), so called gender mainstreaming. One of the most important achievements in this regard is the approval of a set of guidelines encouraging introducing social, environmental and language clauses linked to gender equality and other public policies into the contracting procedures of the city of Galdakao.

Please click on the following link to access the Action plan: II Plan para la Igualdad entre mujeres y hombres de Galdakao