Big Steps from a Small Albanian City: Opening Up Equal Opportunities for Women and Girls

The morning after this interview, Mirela Qenani was due to sit her final university examination. At 39, she was about to graduate in early childhood education, a dream she once believed would never be possible.

She grew up in the region of Lunxhëria, about 12 km from Gjirokastra, and due to the distance and costs involved her secondary education was set aside. She married at 19, after which she moved to the city, dedicating herself to raising her family. After a series of personal hardships, including the loss of a child, her own health problems and the end of her marriage, she found herself raising three children on her own.

“As a single woman with three children, it is very hard to manage financially. We lived in a damp-infested room. That was all I could afford. The children all slept in a double bed. I slept on the floor,” Qenani recalls.

Her situation changed when Gjirokastra municipal authorities reached out through community outreach activities designed to identify women who might not be aware of the support available to them.

“We were going directly to women in communities who had no information about the local support available to them”, recalls Melpomeni Manxhari, Director of Social Services at Gjirokastra Municipality. “A poster does not tell you whether you qualify. A conversation does.”

Social workers helped Qenani gather the necessary documents, complete the application process, which led to her accessing several forms of support. She received economic assistance from the municipal fund, a rent subsidy that covered the full cost of a larger apartment, and food parcels for the children. “It was like one victory after another. First, I learned I did not have a serious illness. Then we finally had a proper home.”

With stable housing and financial support, Qenani decided to go back to school. She completed secondary education and later was admitted to study early childhood education. “I always dreamed of being a good teacher and having many children around me. I achieved both,” she says with a smile.

A Different Way of Looking at Community Needs

Mirela Qenani’s story is one of many that shaped how Gjirokastra Municipality began rethinking local services. With technical support from UN Women through the European Union-funded EU 4 Gender Equality II Project, the Municipality developed and implemented its first Local Gender Action Plan (LGAP) 2022-2024. The plan helped the Municipality to better identify the different needs of women and men and introduce measures to address them.

For Melpomeni Manxhari, who has worked in several roles within the Municipality’s social services department, the process changed the way how local institutions approached their work.

“The first Local Gender Action Plan helped us look at our community differently,” she said. “It encouraged us to identify the gaps and think about what we could do locally to provide targeted services to better address the needs of the community.”

One of the most significant outcomes was to have a dedicated economic assistance fund financed directly by the municipal budget.

A Municipal Economic Assistance Fund

Albania’s national economic assistance programme operates on a points-based formula that determines eligibility for state support. In principle, it is designed to reach the most vulnerable households. In practice, as Manxhari and her team have seen through years of fieldwork, it sometimes fails the most at-risk cases, particularly women with no documented proof of address or formal employment history, which are required for their cases to be processed by the social assistance system.

“The scoring system sometimes does not recognize the real situation of many women in our community,” she explains. “Our immediate response was to act.”

As such, Gjirokastra Municipality established its own economic assistance fund, financed through the municipal budget, with the needs assessed locally by local social workers who know the community and the situation on the ground. The list of beneficiaries is approved by the Municipal Council. If an urgent case pushes spending beyond the initial envelope of 20,000 EUR, the Municipality can repurpose money from other budget lines rather than turn a family away. During the implementation of the first Action Plan, the fund supported 89 women and girls, a direct testament to what gender-responsive budgeting looks like in practice.

The Municipality also expanded its range of social services, including mobile outreach to rural communities and psychosocial support, to ensure that women receive information and support services.

Local Action, National Significance

Albania has reached an important milestone on its path towards European Union membership, entering an advanced phase of the accession negotiations. As part of this process, the country is expected to strengthen gender equality, promote social inclusion, and ensure that public services reach the people who need them most. These commitments are not achieved through national policies alone, but also through ensuring reforms are implemented and impactful at every level of governance. EU accession chapters on Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Social Policies require that gender equality commitments translate into functioning institutions, services, and practical action in municipalities that directly improve people’s daily lives.

By signing the European Charter for the Equality of Women and Men in Local Life and adopting its first LGAP, Gjirokastra has produced and enacted a concrete local-level mechanism. For Manxhari, this is what effective local governance means: understanding the realities of the community and having the tools to respond. For Qenani, it meant something far more personal, a safe home, and the confidence to build a different future for herself and her children.

Gjirokastra wants to open up that possibility to more women. Its next Local Gender Action Plan moves beyond emergency support toward economic independence, vocational training, access to employment and entrepreneurship. Qenani graduates this week. Somewhere in Gjirokastra, another woman is filling out the same forms she once did.