What Are Gender Budgets?
The budget is a policy statement. It reflects the social and economic priorities of a government, the monetary embodiment of its political commitment to specific policies and programmes. Gender-responsive budget analysis provides a way to hold governments accountable for its commitments to gender equality and women’s human rights — by linking these commitments to the distribution, use and generation of public resources.
Gender-responsive budget analysis simply refers to the analysis of actual government expenditure and revenue on women and girls as compared to men and boys. Gender budgets are not separate budgets for women and they don't aim to solely increase spending on women-specific programmes.
Although national budgets may appear to be gender-neutral policy instruments, government expenditures and revenue collection have different impacts on women and men. Gender budget analysis helps governments decide how policies need to be adjusted, and where resources need to be reallocated.
It also provides a way to hold governments accountable for its commitments to gender equality and women's human rights, such as Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), by linking these commitments to the distribution, use and generation of public resources. Gender-responsive budget analysis promotes equality, transparency, efficiency and accountability.
Gender responsive budget initiatives can be carried out at national, provincial and municipal levels and may cover the overall budget or selected parts. They can be done within government, by the Ministry of Finance in conjunction with the Ministry of Women's Affairs or other spending ministries, or outside government, by NGOs and/or independent researchers. Initiatives with support within and outside of government, operating in dialogue with each other, have proven especially effective.
Applying gender analysis to the budget is not simply a technical exercise. It requires thinking about government finances in a new way, looking beyond the household as a single unit of analysis to examine the situation of each of its members, male and female. It requires a focus on the unpaid care economy, in which much of women's time is spent. And it requires gender-disaggregated statistics.
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