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Budgeting to Fulfill International Gender and Human Rights Commitments

Author: D Budlender
Date: 2004
Size: 51 pages (3 MB)

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Summary

How can national budgets be monitored to assess their contribution to fulfilling international gender and human rights commitments? As part of its ongoing work supporting the gender analysis of budgets in Southern Africa, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) has designed a tool to support this process. It illustrates how various international instruments aimed at achieving gender equality can be used to evaluate gender responsive budgets (GRBs).

The key international instruments designed to achieve gender equality are CEDAW and BPfA. CEDAW is the Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. BPfA is the Beijing Platform for Action, which focuses on poverty, discrimination and violence against women. There has been little work done that brings these international instruments together, but there are strong links between them.

Gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) initiatives examine the budget of a country to see how it affects women and men, girls and boys. They analyse how government raises revenue and spends money to see whether it promotes gender equality or increases inequality. Key features of GRBs are:

• They focus on budgets, because without money, government cannot implement any other policy successfully.
• They ensure the needs and interests of individuals from different social groups are addressed in the budget, particularly women and men, girls and boys.
• They focus on gender rather than only on women.
• They are not about separate budgets for women or men, but about mainstreaming gender awareness into all policies and budgets of all ministries and agencies.
• GRB work recognises women's unpaid contributions to society and economy, suggesting ways to relieve this burden and improve its effectiveness and efficiency.

Budget analysis can be conducted by governments, NGOs, women's organisations or parliaments. It works best where governments use performance-oriented budgeting, and include outputs and outcomes in budget reporting. The International Women's Rights Action Watch (IRWAR)/ Commonwealth Secretariat Manual, CEDAW's response to previous government reports and a set of the most recent government budget books are useful. Information often needs to be disaggregated, not only by gender but by rural/urban and sometimes also age, class, wealth, race or ethnicity.

Five steps should be followed in GRB analysis:

• Describe the situation of women and men, girls and boys (and different sub-groups) in the sector.
• Check whether the government's policy is therefore gender-sensitive and whether an adequate budget is allocated to implement the gender-sensitive policy.
• Check whether the expenditure is spent as planned and examine the impact of the policy and expenditure.
• Examine general or mainstream expenditure.
• Examine expenditures that promote equal employment opportunities for civil servants. These constitute the largest fraction of a total budget: expenditures that explicitly target women or men or a gender issue only constitute a tiny fraction.

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Source: Budlender, D., 2004, ‘Budgeting to Fulfill International Gender and Human Rights Commitments’, UNIFEM, Zimbabwe