Firstly, I express my gratitude for the presence here today of the OSCE Secretary General, Helga Schmid, whose words are encouraging and particularly inspiring. Thank you Madam Secretary General. Your attendance testifies for the importance attached by you personally, and the OSCE as an organization, to the cross-dimensional fight against corruption, through a gendered perspective, first and foremost.

Secondly, let me just say that it is a great privilege to welcome you as guest speakers and participants to this conference. It is reassuring to see here today Albanian State institutions and organizations, representatives of embassies in Tirana, OSCE executive structures from Vienna, research and academic organizations. We work concertedly, we collaborate closely and this can only bring benefits to our host country if not beyond.

Together with my colleagues, we have invited an excellent group of international and local experts who will help us to understand current study on gender inequalities and corruption, before drawing attention to the situation here in Albania.

For this reason, we will benefit from the expertise of the OSCE Special Representative for Anti-Corruption, Professor Anita Ramasastry, and Ambassador Melanne Verveer, Executive Director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security, to chair the technical panels and offer their global and regional perspectives.

The contribution of Prof. Paola Severino, the vice President of LUISS, among others, and former OSCE Special Representative for Anti-Corruption further enriches the discussion with an academic perspective and the hindsight of an OSCE leader.

It is under favorable auspices I believe, that this Conference takes place as part of the third annual Integrity Week, organized by ICC Albania, represented here by Ms. Bilgen Aldan, with the support of the Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. I thank both Ms. Aldan and His Excellency Ambassador Vos for their valuable dedication to the cause of integrity, anti-corruption and gender equality. Thank you.

I would also like to thank the Ambassador of Sweden to Albania, Ambassador Elsa Hastad, representing the country that holds the Chair of the OSCE this year, for the dedication of her country and herself personally to promote a gendered approach to all aspects of public life. Thank you for attending this Conference.

This forum also takes place on the International Day of Human Rights, a day to mark the adoption of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights on 10 December 1948. This is a timely reminder that corruption is a universal plague that leads to human rights violations, thus endangering the security of countries and stability of societies.

The responsibility bestowed on us by the manifold consequences of gendered-impact of corruption requires the garnering of any kind of resources and not sparing any effort fighting this global scourge.

Ladies and gentlemen,

In addition to raising awareness and sharing international perspectives, one reason for being here today is to reiterate our continued support for Albania’s efforts to combat corruption through a gendered perspective.

Firstly, we back up our support with the concrete findings of the research commissioned by the Presence on the study of gendered impact of corruption in the healthcare and tertiary education sectors in Albania.

My colleagues will inform you on the findings of this study that can serve as a basis for further action.

Secondly, the progress of Albania in bridging gender gaps in social and economic realms has to continue unabatedly. As my colleagues have informed me, the fight against corruption in Albania has been primarily focused on strengthening legal measures and the institutional set-up, while the impact of corruption on the population, including on different groups of society, has only been addressed sporadically.

Policy-making can be enriched if various differentiating criteria are engaged when exploring the root causes of corruption and its social effects: socio-economic background, educational level, ethnicity, sex, gender identity. Only then we can have a complete picture of the devastating effects of corruption in society. And thus, only then we will be able to craft and implement targeted solutions.

Furthermore, the production of gender-specific data on corruption is in fact pivotal in the development of gender-specific approaches to fighting corruption that help to boost the economy, foster the respect for human rights and consolidate democracy. These are key letters of the stability alphabet. And they are fully in line with our OSCE whole-of-society approach to support projects, with the OSCE grammar of security.

To date, we have seen gender mainstreaming in various public policies, but we have yet to see gender integrated cohesively into the fight against corruption. This is the fundamental point that we all must, on a global level, seek to change. And here in Albania must seek to concretely address based on our host country needs.

Now, what do corruption and gender inequalities have in common? They are tightly connected to one another by a common denominator, namely abuse of entrusted power. Corruption takes advantage of women’s inequality in society and reinforces it.

And that is precisely why we use Integrity Week to focus our discussion on how fighting corruption inevitably has to address its roots in gender discrimination.

In brief, we mean three things when we talk about gender and corruption:

-First, women and girls may be impacted by different and specific forms of corruption.

-The experience of women and girls with corruption may be different, particularly in different sectors.

-Altogether, this may have costly implications for society at large, as corruption can compromise access to and quality of basic services (like health and education) and socio-economic empowerment, with a ripple effect on a country’s potential for economic, social and democratic development.

I salute the combination of two approaches in this Conference: the international context intertwined with the Albanian context. The first panel will frame the discussion in an international context, exploring how issues of gender inequality impact overarching societal development. The second panel will then feature findings of preliminary research conducted in Albania on this subject, and seek to begin more practical, tangible discussion of gender and anti-corruption policy in specific sectors.

With the priority the Government of Albania has given to both gender equality and the fight against corruption, we trust that by focusing on how a key and, in fact majority demographic are affected, may help to connect progress in the fight against corruption with citizens’ tangible experiences in this realm. Actually, women are 50.2% of Albania’s population according to your national statistics in 2021.

Often times, strategic and policy discussions of the fight against corruption are detached from the direct experience of citizens and this is why citizens - of all demographics - need to be at the center of responses to fighting corruption.

That’s the conversation we are starting today, building awareness of this important issue before looking at responses and next steps we can take together to tackle inequality.

Thank you to you all for joining us in this discussion. Let me thank particularity my fantastic team for all the work they have been doing, and I look forward to supporting next steps as we launch this important work necessarily together.

*Remarks of Head of OSCE Presence at “Raising Awareness on Gender Inequalities and Corruption” conference