Gender responsive public procurement

Online workshop organised in the frame of the IN-HABIT H2020 project

15th February 2023 – h.14 ECT

Public procurement are the processes in which public institutions buy goods and services. The potential for these processes to provide benefits for local communities is huge but mostly under used in municipalities all across Europe and the world.

In this session as part of the Inhabit Project, Matthew Baqueriza-Jackson will hone specifically on gender responsive public procurement and explore with participants how their procurement processes and practices can contribute towards addressing gender and other forms of inequality. In this and using a mix of presentations, training videos and tasks, Matthew will:

Explain why public procurement and gender equality is important.
Detail generally how cities can change their procurement processes and practices to become more strategic.
Detail specifically how cities can use more gender responsive approaches to procurement and ask participants to work through an example.
Explore the barriers the organisations present at the session face in public procurement and how they can be overcome.

Matthew Baqueriza-Jackson is an Independent Policy Advisor who has been undertaking work around local economic development for the last 20 years. Matthew has a particular specialism in supporting cities to think differently about public procurement – the process used by Municipalities and other Institutions to buy goods, services and works. Historically, public procurement decision-making has often been driven solely by the factor of cost – however, Matthew’s work encourages cities to also think about the impact public procurement decision-making has upon local economies, addressing social and environmental challenges and enabling equality, including gender inequality. For the last 8 years, Matthew has been an accredited expert for the URBACT Programme and has supported over 20 cities across Member States to think about public procurement in a more strategic way. Indeed, this has led to the production of two online training courses by URBACT – one on strategic public procurement and the other on gender responsive public procurement. Matthew is currently representing URBACT on the EU Urban Agenda Partnership and undertaking work around public procurement in cities in Scotland and Ireland. Matthew is based in Elgol, the Isle of Skye.

Watch here the TED talk Changing Spending, Changing Lives by Matthew Jackson