Under the implementation of The Asia Foundation’s Urban Governance Project (UGP), IRIM has conducted the gender assessment of public services accessibility among vulnerable groups in Ulaanbaatar city between January to September, 2019.

The Asia Foundation in collaboration with the Municipality of Ulaanbaatar (MUB) is implementing the UGP, funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The project supports the municipality’s administrative decentralization of pro-poor services. It pilots the delivery of selected public administration services at the khoroo level. The municipality is planning to relocate services to khoroos over the next few years. Hence, the municipality adopted the SDG’s principle of ‘Leave no one behind’ and aims to promote human-rights based approach to reach those who face barriers and unable to receive public administrative services. Therefore this survey was conducted based on the necessity to understand and identify the barriers and challenges faced by under-represented groups and to identify factors that affect these barriers.

Within the project implementation, the IRIM team aimed to achieve the following main objectives:

1. identify barriers and current levels of accessibility of the vulnerable groups in Ulaanbaatar’s ger areas, in accessing the identified public administrative services;
2. carry out an in-depth analysis of the factors affecting the accessibility;
3. assess the gender-responsiveness of those services; and
4. provide recommendations to the MUB for reflecting gender-responsive and equity-focused principles in its future design of public administrative services.

The assessment used an analytical framework that comprised following six assessment criteria developed based on the findings of a desktop review:

• Availability;
• Social accessibility (knowledge);
• Social accessibility (attitudes); 
• Physical accessibility;
• Accountability; and
• Gender-responsive budgeting. 

The field data collection took place between May to June 2019. The questionnaire survey was conducted from a total of 385 respondents from 11 khoroos in seven districts of Ulaanbaatar’s ger areas. Moreover semi-structured interviews with relevant 20 public officials, case studies and field observational checklists were included in the data collection. 

On 8 November 2019, IRIM research team presented assessment findings to the respective gender officials of Municipality of Ulaanbaatar. Sh.Ankhmaa, Deputy Governor of Capital city in charge of social and development issue made an opening remarks and emphasized the importance of implementing the recommendations of the study in the every level of public administrative because the gender assessment of the public administrative service accessibility which has never been made before especially related to khoroos and districts conducted detailed analyzes.

The research team would like to thank to The Urban Governance Project team and all the survey participants for taking their time to share their views and experiences and to the governors and staff at the khoroos, where this assessment took place.