WFD’s work through our Inclusive and Accountable Politics programme in Ukraine helped the parliament to strengthen its role in scrutinising government, improving accountability for legislative and financial matters, and making society more inclusive of women and underrepresented groups.
By making the parliament more accountable to Ukrainian citizens, WFD helped ensure there is robust scrutiny of government policy and performance. This accountability was boosted by WFD’s support to the parliament to set up better internal oversight practices, enhancing the independent budget committee’s ability to provide greater oversight over how public funds are spent and ensuring that new financial and economic legislation is introduced in line with international best practice.
WFD paved the way to support the parliament in introducing new mechanisms to review laws to ensure they are working as intended (a practice known as post-legislative scrutiny, PLS). Post-legislative scrutiny is the practice of assessing the effectiveness and impact of laws. WFD worked with many different sections of the parliament and engage staff of relevant committees and the parliament’s lawyers to support introducing these new ways of working.
Gender equality was mainstreamed across all of our programme activities, with a particular focus on ensuring women, people with disabilities and other vulnerable groups have greater and equal access to formal and informal ways to participate in politics. To help achieve this aim, the programme implemented a series of workshops and trainings, with a particular focus on how public spending can lead to a gender pay gap if funds are not appropriately allocated.
WFD worked in partnership with parliamentary officials, committees and parliamentarians from across political factions, giving them the technical and political support which was needed to make progress on the European Parliament’s roadmap on internal reform. In particular, WFD completed a functional analysis of the parliamentary Secretariat between December 2019 and August 2020.
