National Planning and Budgeting
Public planning is the starting point for the development and implementation of all public services. It is therefore necessary for gender equality to be a stated objective of all government plans, supported with specific plans of action and sufficient funding to address the needs and priorities of women. UN Women supports national and local initiatives to include gender perspectives in budgeting and economic processes.
Gender- Responsive Budgets
Gender-Responsive Budgeting is about ensuring government budgets, policies and programs address the specific needs of individuals from different social groups, taking into account the biases that may exist because of a person’s gender, ethnicity, class or caste. This does not entail drafting separate budgets, but is about determining differences in needs of men and women, and ensuring there is adequate funding allocations and planning to provide for those needs.
Gender-Responsive Budgeting relies on detailed data-collection and analysis of the different ways in which men and women contribute to a country’s revenue, and what expenditure is needed to ensure budgets are equally benefiting all. Gender-responsive budget analysis, combined legislative actions and policy measures has the ability to help overcome gender bias and discrimination. It further contributes to a wider culture of public transparency and makes governments accountable for their actions on addressing gender-inequality.
UN Women’s approach
UNIFEM (now a part of UN Women) has contributed to building interest in, and the capacity to implement Gender-Responsive Budgeting initiatives in over 40 countries worldwide. Since 1997 UNIFEM (now part of UN Women) has worked to develop relationships between UN agencies, the Commonwealth Secretariat, International Development Research Institute and the Economic Commission to facilitate knowledge-building and encourage public sector reform worldwide to incorporate Gender-Responsive Budgeting practices.
In 2001 UNIFEM launched its global program, Gender Strengthening Economic Governance: Applied Gender Analysis to Government Budgets, to provide technical and financial support to gender-budgeting initiatives throughout Latin America, Africa and the Asia/Pacific. The program’s initial focus was on making gender-budgeting tools available and increasing stakeholder capacity to carry out gender-budgeting analysis. These goals extended in 2005, to take a stronger focus on the needs of poor women in particular.
Programming on GRB has received financial support from the governments of Belgium, Canada, the European Commission, Italy and the UK, as well as from other partner UN organisations.