Why Gender Budgets?
Gender-responsive budget initiatives promote:
Equality
Although national budgets may appear to be gender-neutral policy instruments, government expenditures and revenue collection have different impacts on women and men. A rights-based approach to budgeting helps ensure that gender equality becomes both a goal and indicator of economic governance. It becomes a tangible measurement of the implementation of CEDAW and other human rights instruments.
Accountability
The recent reviews of progress in achieving gender equality as a result of the major international conferences of the 1990s - including the International Conference on Population and Development, the World Summit for Social Development, and the Fourth World Conference on Women - have shown mixed results. Gender responsive budget initiatives, linking commitments to gender equality to the ways in which governments raise and spend money, provide a concrete way to increase government accountability to all of its people.
Gender-sensitive budgets are important instruments for making governments accountable to women and ensuring that governments live up to the commitments they have made in international conferences and in a variety of policy statements.
— Budgets As If People Mattered, 2000
Efficiency
Mounting evidence shows that gender inequality leads to major losses in economic efficiency and human development. Macroeconomic policy can increase, reduce, or leave unchanged the losses to society from gender inequality, primarily through adjustments in fiscal policy, including both revenues and expenditures. Thus gender responsive budget policies can go far to reconcile the objectives of gender equality, human development and economic efficiency.
Recognising gender inequality as an efficiency issue does not mean seeing women as a resource to be used for increasing productivity and growth. Rather the message is that if women themselves have more control over resources there will be gains for society as a whole; but if gender inequality persists, there will be continuing losses for society as a whole.
— Diane Elson, 1999
Transparency
Gender responsive budget initiatives engage members of civil society in a vital area of political and economic policy debate, especially women, who are generally marginalised from such discussions. They can open up the budget -making process and strengthen economic governance.
Gender budget initiatives are a reflection of the transition to more open, participatory and responsive systems of governance. There is increasing interest in giving the poor and excluded a political voice, and influencing allocation of public resources in favour of them. Democracy has come with the expectation not only of participation and inclusion but also of freedom from poverty.
— Winnie Byanyima, MP-Uganda, 2000
