MPs enlightened on gender budgeting

Daily Graphic, Pg 6, Sat. Feb. 21/09
Article: Rebecca Quaicoe-Duho

THE application of gender mainstreaming in a country’s budgetary process is referred to as gender budgeting. It means incorporating a gender-based assessment of a nation's budget at all levels of the budgetary process and restructuring revenues and expenditures in order to promote gender equality.
It is used to highlight expenditure directly affecting women in comparison to men and may be a tool for raising awareness and in the longer-term restructuring of the budget to better reflect the needs and interests of both men and women.
Although gender experts say the concept is relatively new, they explain that gender budgeting does not mean drawing up a separate budget for women; rather it is a dissection of the government budget to establish its gender-differential impacts and to translate gender commitments into budgetary commitments.
The main objective of a gender-sensitive budget is to improve the analysis of incidence of budgets, attain more effective targeting of public expenditure and offset any undesirable gender-specific consequences of previous budgetary measures. It involves analysis of any form of public revenue or expenditure and identification of the impacts on women and men, girls and boys.
The issue of gender budgeting is increasingly gaining acceptance as a tool for engendering macroeconomic policy making. The Fourth World Conference of Women held in Beijing in September 1995 and the Platform for Action that it adopted called for a gender perspective in all macroeconomic policies and their budgetary dimensions.
The Outcome Document of the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Women held in June 2000 also called upon all the nations to mainstream a gender perspective into key macroeconomics and social development policies and national development programmes. Emphasis on gender budgeting was also placed by the Sixth Conference of Commonwealth Ministers of Women’s Affairs held in New Delhi in April 2000.
Australia was the first country to develop a gender-sensitive budget in 1984, followed by South Africa in 1995. Other nations, including Canada, United Kingdom, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania and Uganda have also taken steps to make their national budgets gender sensitive to promote gender equality.
One main achievement of Ghana in that direction was the commencement of gender budgeting in 2008 on a pilot basis in three ministries, namely the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Ministry of Health and Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Environment.
To ensure that the idea of gender budgeting is pushed further in the country, parliamentarians are being targeted and sensitised to the need to ‘wear gender lenses’ to scrutinise the 2009 budget, which is yet to be put before Parliament by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning.
To this end, the Women in Law and Development (WiLDAF) Ghana, under its “We Know Politics” project, organised a day’s workshop for 20 female and 10 male parliamentarians in Accra on gender budgeting, with the aim to upgrade their knowledge so that they can contribute to debates in the House when the budget is brought before it.
According to the National Co-ordinator of WiLDAF, Ms Bernice Sam, all policies and agenda of the government are supported by the budget, which according to her, is often generalised without consideration to diverse social needs, particularly the gender components.
In accepting a gender responsive budget in the European Parliament in 2003, members of the House specified that building a public budget from a gender perspective means identifying how different citizens benefit from public expenditure and contributing to public revenue, highlighting the difference between women and men by using qualitative and quantitative data and benchmarking.
A Gender Analyst, Mr Vitus Azeem, in an interview on the need for gender budgeting, said the aim was to transform financial and budgetary policy in accordance with gender equality objectives.
He said such a budget should involve quantitative and qualitative gender-based assessment, while also address and incorporate a gender perspective in the whole budgetary process, adding that re-allocations of revenue and expenditure and restructuring of the budgetary process may be necessary in order to promote gender equality.
Gender experts contend that gender budgeting requires that the human and financial resources need to organise and carry out analyses that will be allocated. This, according to them, is not likely to be given priority unless actively requested for and supported by the top management, saying that the active commitment at the level of ministers or commissioners is consequently crucial for success to be achieved.
Gender-budgeting methodology, they also say, must tackle socio-economic inequalities between women and men according to the different realities at local, regional and national levels in order to be appropriate and successful in achieving gender equality.
They further state that the way in which national budgets are usually formulated ignores the different socially determined roles, responsibilities and capabilities of men and women, adding that budgets formed from a gender-neutral perspective ignore the different impacts on men and women because their roles, responsibilities and capacities in any society are never the same.
These differences, they say, are generally structured in a way that leaves women at a disadvantage in society by creating inequality gaps. Therefore, gender budgeting is an important tool for analysing the gap between expressed commitments by governments and the decision-making processes involved by governments to raise and spend moneys.
Gender-responsive budget is important, because evidence suggests that the economic gains of gender equality leads to increased output and better development of people’s capacities. Women’s economic empowerment could provide the possibility for all countries to have some combination of increased productivity, less stress and better overall health.