Evaluation Report: UNIFEM’s Work on Gender-Responsive Budgeting

Gender-Responsive Budgeting (GRB) has become an internationally acknowledged tool for supporting implementation of commitments towards achieving gender equality and the realization of women’s rights. UNIFEM contributes extensively to building interest, capacity and commitment to incorporate a gender equality perspective in budgetary processes and practices. Since 2001, UNIFEM has supported GRB initiatives in more than 35 countries and has positioned itself as a leading player in GRB in the UN system.

This evaluation critically examines how UNIFEM can further influence the achievement of gender equality through national budgetary processes and uses the criteria of relevance, effectiveness and sustainability to analyse data. The evaluation was conducted in three stages and produced a number of different findings at each stage, which are documented in three sets of reports.

The first report details the findings and recommendations of the second phase of UNIFEM's global GRB Programme "Strengthening Economic Governance: Applied Gender Analysis to Government Budgets,” which launched in 2001 and provided technical and financial support to gender budget initiatives in Latin America, Africa and the Asia-Pacific. The second set of reports provides an analysis of four country case studies — Ecuador, Morocco, Mozambique and Senegal — and the third report is a wider evaluation of UNIFEM's corporate approach to GRB.