Gender Mainstreaming in Development: Engendering Budgets

Rationale and Justification for Engendering Budgets

Overview

This section is aimed at winning over the government staff into the inevitability of engendering the resource allocation and management process.  It therefore argued by stating the fact that most economic planners often base their planning on aggregates such as households as the basic units of analysis in their planning approaches. The challenge from gender analysts thus was the argument that this notion of assuming that the household is a harmonious and aggregated entity as regards individual and sex based differences neglected the impact and influence of intra-household dynamics. Other dimensions at the household level that economists should take into full consideration therefore include: types of household headship (e.g., whether male or female, matrifocal, child headed or grandparent headed, etc); dis-harmony in intra-household power and resource sharing (e.g., male members imposing their whims over especially female members of the household), have significant implications for policy and planning.   

Budgets are tools that governments use in order to achieve economic and development goals. Allocation of resources entails the government deciding on the size of resources to allocate towards the various services provided- as well as how these resources shall be pieced up among different obligations. Budget policies are used as a means of addressing income or wealth inequalities in most communities. Budgets are done through prioritizing certain objectives over others (e.g. choices on whether to promote employment, stable prices, stable interest rates, etc). They form a strong pillar for macro-economic policies. The impact of budgets needs to entrench, alleviate or redress inter and intra household inequalities between women and men, especially if the underlying assumption is that there is fair distribution of resources and benefits.

Justification for gendering budgets

Women and men have different roles and functions in society drawn from the socialization process and therefore have different needs. In effect, the socialization process creates differences between the sexes in access to and control over resources. Because these differences are gender based, they cannot be redressed if not consciously targeted. It is also observed that gender inequality is inefficient and has serious implications for productivity and well-being. Macroeconomic policy can intensify rather than alleviate ways in which gender inequality constrains women’s ability to increase production.

Further, many government policies ignore the contribution of the ‘care- economy’[1] and only measure other macroeconomic aggregates such as investment and savings, imports and exports along with government expenditures and revenues. This is a significant omission especially considering the time-use studies have estimated that the value of global unpaid work is USD11trillion. Economists and policy makers have argued that ignoring this represents a bias. New macroeconomic thinking recognizes that the ‘care economy’ is an important contributor to production.  Monetizing these activities could significantly improve the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Emerging Issues

This session raised a number of important questions and issues. These included:

Integrating the Care-Economy

·         Does monetizing the reproductive care economy activities send right ‘development’ messages? (e.g., is it not that a higher GDP may in essence represent a ‘fictitious’ situation whereby a country is perceived as better developed while it is actually not?) . This raised a litany of questions such as:

ü  How do we ensure coherence between the care activities with other factors such as taxation in the System of National Accounts (SNA)?

ü  Does spending on health, water and education automatically impact positively on women?

ü  The Local Governments Act (1997) requires all people aged 18 years and above to pay taxes, but most women in this age category do not pay tax. Could this be the reason as to why mostly men make decisions on revenue raised from taxation?

ü  Do women not pay taxes for men? If women’s work is not paid, where should they raise money to pay tax?

ü  Does economic empowerment of women lead to more independence for women and therefore motivate them to ‘break-away’ from men? Are men burdens to women?

ü  What does the fact that fewer women are accessing health facilities or benefiting from extension services reveal about public expenditure on these sectors?

§  The above questions did not supply straight answers but rather provided deeper insights on what needs to be done to support GBIs. It was observed that additional work had to be done to discern the advantages and disadvantages of capturing the care economy in the SNA. Participants also noted the need to clarify whether gender budgeting was concerned with ensuring 50:50 sharing of resources between women and men, and further whether gender budgeting aimed at efficiency or equity outcomes.

Accounting Technicalities

§  The challenge of accounting for care activities is that they must be ‘numerical’ or ‘quantified’ in order to be captured in the SNA. On the issue of misleading messages arising from inclusion of care economy values in the SNA, participants questioned whether or not the estimation of say Per Capita Incomes in Uganda as amounting to USD 300 implied that every Ugandan had this money. A critical concern was whether it was good accounting practice to ignore the value of work that nearly a half of the Country’s population are engaged in simply because no monetary value is not attached to it.

Importance of the Care-Economy

§  The important contribution of the household economy to the market economy and the need for both of them to co-exist. They also noted that it was extremely critical to analyze the impact of taxation on the different categories of the population, women and men, young or old.

§  Some participants were not clear about value addition of gender mainstreaming, although the workshop design focused on the ‘how to do aspects’. What explains this is probably that some of the participants had not been adequately exposed to gender training prior to the workshop. The key lesson that may be drawn from this acknowledgement is that contrary to the expectation that the need for gender planning is clearly understood by all duty bearers in the various sectors, targeted gender training is still necessary in both Sector Ministries and Local Governments.

Innovative Calculation of the GDP

§  Productive sectors needed to function effectively in order to leverage substantial funding of social development activities. They further argued that although calculation of the Country’s GDP shows non-monetary elements, the tools of analysis and calculation are not engendered and therefore grossly ignore the important function of the care economy, which is estimated to engage nearly half of the country’s population (mainly women). The notion of gender budgeting was an innovation that aimed at redressing this gap among others. However an important issue that still required thought was whether or not calculation and inclusion of the care economy in the system of national accounts would automatically or directly benefit women.

Demonisation of Men

§  Most gender discourses had a tendency to belittle what men do, or ‘demonized’ them. They opined that there was need to reorient the discourse and lay emphasis on complementarity, and that such deliberations must portray some level of cultural sensitivity. However, subsequent discussions pointed out that there was nothing like a national culture that provides the yardstick for what constitutes cultural sensitivity. The issue at hand was the national budget, which as a principle, must impact on all nationals equitably, irrespective of sex. It was noted that most of the cultural practices that denied women access to and control over resources were patriarchal and a bargain with patriarchy calls for a more pronounced role of men in order to realize significant change.

Monitoring Gender Mainstreaming

§  Various attempts at gender mainstreaming had been done in some sectors but it was not clear what the outcomes were. This observation points to the need for documenting experiences of gender mainstreaming so as to provide useful case studies or a wide spectrum of best practices to be replicated or adapted by other actors.

Engendering a Government Budget

  

Having established the rationale and justification for engendering budgets, the workshop focused on how an engendered budget ought to look like. This therefore session provided a conceptual, historical and practical overview of engendering government budgets, as well as the associated challenges.  Government resources have a different impact on women and men. The session urged that economic policies have a strong bearing on the livelihoods and living standards of all community members. Most policy changes tended to either narrow or widen gender differentials in terms of incomes, health, education, and nutrition among others. Closer examination of budgets from a gender perspective helps to identify gender gaps in access to and distribution of public resources. Engendering budgets thus targets the redefining of priorities in accordance with actual gender needs and thereby enable resources to be allocated likewise. Through gender mainstreaming, the budget responds to the needs of the entire population more effectively.

As correctly motivated in the section above, the engendering of budgets is inevitable because of the necessity for establishing:  gender equity and efficient use of scarce resources; due to following up on governments commitments towards redistribution of resources more equitably; and, due to the fact that gender inequality hampers socio-economic growth, and makes the economy pay for the resultant inequitable application of resources in terms of reduced labour productivity and condensed national output tomorrow. This session therefore underlines the fact that investing in women has a significant inevitable impact on situations such as: Infant Mortality Rate, nutrition and reducing demographic expansion.

Concept of Gender Budgets

The session stated that the concept of gender budgeting originated in Australia in the early 1980s. The Australian government made it mandatory for all departments to indicate, in their budget submissions, how their interventions would impact on gender inequality. This practice was adopted in South Africa, The United Kingdom, Tanzania, and Uganda among others. In most of these countries, the initiatives have been mainly advanced by civil society agencies[2].  Gender budgeting involves both an analysis of allocation between and within sectors to determine impact. It identifies gender-based expenditure by government. Gender Budget Initiatives can identify equal employment opportunity expenditure e.g. re-writing job descriptions to reflect equal employment opportunity principles.

Main achievements of GBIs range from actual expenditure re-allocations, to opening up the traditionally secretive budget process to much greater transparency and accountability. In addition there has been re-prioritization of expenditure (e.g. as in Philippines where a minimum of 5% of each budget is reserved for gender mainstreaming); and affecting policy changes (e.g. the working family tax credit in the United Kingdom); plus exposing policy weaknesses (e.g. in Sri Lanka where the initiative revealed weak targeting of women in agriculture).  Other benefits from engendering the budgeting process, include: exposing general budgetary weaknesses (e.g. in Uganda where it has been shown that Local Government budgets are spent on emoluments of government officials); sharpening approaches to gender mainstreaming (e.g., in Tanzania, the Ministry of Finance issued general budget guidelines for gender mainstreaming during the 1999 budget process); plus, developing economic literacy and participation through for example production of simplified budgeting guides.  

The Challenge

The challenge towards engendering budgets involve the following questions on choices: whether the government or CSOs should lead the engendering process ( from the Tanzania experience a collaboration effort was found to be more productive); constant follow up action in the engendering process (e.g., there is usually a gradual fade away effect in the close monitoring of the engendering process); and, ensuring broad participation at all levels and at all times (e.g., it is quite easy for the government to gradually lose its emphasis on community participation aspect). It is un-debatable that the concept of gender budgeting is integral to and a powerful tool for gender mainstreaming. Gender budgeting is not synonymous with women’s budgets, but an effort to assess the impact of budgets on women and men.

Emerging Issues

§  Clarification on the linkage between gender mainstreaming and other vulnerable groups such as the youth, persons with disability and the elderly. It was clarified that whereas the youth, elderly, children and others are groups of people, gender does not refer to a specific group. In essence, gender issues cut across all these socio-economic groups, around the entire life cycle.

§  Need for effective partnerships between Government and CSOs, especially as regards sourcing development assistance. They further noted the need to identify best practices from other Countries, for instance on how to lobby key decision makers to reserve quotas for gender mainstreaming.

§  Need to link gender concerns with major policy thrusts such as privatization of some key sectors e.g. agriculture, water and sanitation etc. A contra-argument to this was that conversely, a critical gender analysis of privatization (as well as other policy thrusts) was necessary to establish its impact on women and men. The need to strengthen participatory budgeting processes from the grassroots to national level was emphasized, as well as broadening the understanding of linkages between gender budgeting and poverty eradication.

§  How should the defence expenditures be engendered? It was noted that addressing gender issues in defence related to the approach used in conflict resolution, as well as the handling of post-conflict situations, particularly how the needs of women and men involved in or affected by conflict matters/ defence services are met.

§  Different countries have varied approaches to gender budgeting, but the only similarity is the purpose for which it is done: ascertaining how public budgets impact on women and men.  

 Framework and Tools for Analysis of Gender Issues in Budgets.

The prime aim of this session was to take the participants on a tour of a framework for making analysis of gender issues from a technical angle. This session wanted to provide familiarity with tools for unpacking the gender dynamics at the micro, meso, and macro levels of national economic development policies. The process utilized the ILO developed SEAGA tool. This tool makes a socio-economic policy analysis by defining intra-and inter sectoral gender issues; it examines policy alternatives on gender impact, costs and feasibility; looked at types of macro-economic, structural and meso-level policies; and, lastly provided a foundation for making choices on options for engendering the socio-economic planning and development processes.

Tool One: Field, Intermediate, Macro Level Analysis

Macro Level Analysis

At the macro level it is essential to focus the gender analysis on: international agreements and policies, national policies and legislation, and economic and social plans. Particular interest was directed towards the socio and economic aspects of major macroeconomic policies, e.g., revenue raising measures, government expenditures, monetary and exchange rate policies, and Balance of Trade and financial flows with the rest of the world.

Intermediate Level Analysis

Analysis at this level focuses on: structures, institutions and services that function to operationalize the link between the macro and the field levels. Analysis at this level includes examining organisation structures, integrating gender into management, service provision planning, and incorporating information from the field.

Field Level Analysis

On the field level, the analysis should focus on: men and women as individuals and in groups; and on socio economic differences among household and communities as a whole. It aims at strengthening the role of individuals, groups and communities in the development process. Other analytical tools in this framework included:[3]

·         Stakeholder Analysis (e.g., discerning who are the primary and secondary stakeholders, and involving them accordingly).

·         Livelihood Analysis (e.g.,  looking roles of different stakeholders, and how people meet their basic needs through resources they access or control).

·         Resource and Constraints Analysis (e.g., seeing how people meet their basic needs and pursue their long term requirements, by checking whether resources are not obstructed by policy decvisions at other levels).

·         Gender Analysis (e.g., determination of roles, access to and control of resources, and responsibilities pertaining to different actors).

·         Circular flow of income (e.g., critiquing the limited view of conventional economic analysis as implying only the formal sector rather than the including actual involvement and contribution from the informal sector and household domestic levels).

·         Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Framework (e.g., a framework revealing the levels of gender equality and empowerment pertaining to men and women in their respective communities).

This session concluded with a diagrammatic overview on the conditions of women. The diagram sought to provide a vivid highlight on the dynamics of the conditions and positions of women in society, this overview was deemed as crucial in building up a more comprehensive overview of the interplay between gender relations, resource allocation and gender based needs of community members.  

Diagram:

Structural Framework On Conditions Of Women

Gender Relations		Workload		Single heads of households
Subordination, Inequality, economic denial		Double workload, combination and domestic and gainful employment		Poverty, Loss of male authority
Discrimination		Gender Roles		Division of Labour
Health care, education, credit, wages, factors of production		Invisibility, low status, dependence		Housewife, subsistence, processor, supplier, care provider, transporter
Cultural Factors		Modernisation		Global Market Interaction
Patriarchal values and behavior, patriarchal marriages and family laws, male dominance of properties		Displacement of women by men, under rated/ under valued subsistence roles, social marginalisation		Gender specific division of labour, male dominance of markets or cash targeted produce, male migration, withdrawal of male contribution at household level

  

Emerging Issues

§  Concern on the practicability, prioritization and choice of the tools to use since they were several and that there were different levels of analysis- viz, macro, intermediate and field levels. To this, it was clarified that the choice of tools should be context/ situation specific. The tools capture gender relevant information at any level of analysis.

§  Observed that gender budgeting was not a requirement under the budget call circular and therefore GBIs were likely to have no significant impact. Whereas this was noted as a fact, participants opined that the budget call circular tasked MGLSD develop and issue guidelines on crosscutting concerns within its mandate to other sectors and local governments for use by the Sector Working Groups during the budget process. It was the considered opinion of the workshop that these guidelines were a clear entry point for gender budgeting.

§  Considering the instructive force of the budget call circular however, it was suggested as imperative that the circular was explicit on gender budgeting, rather than anticipate the issuance of guidelines from a line ministry. It was further envisaged that the emerging Social Development Sector Strategic Investment Plan (SDIP) would provide substantial support to GBIs. MGLSD and PEWG were challenged to be more pragmatic in ensuring that Sector Working Groups engendered their sector budgets. As regards Local Governments, it was observed that the Harmonized Planning Guides for Local Governments too emphasized the principle of gender mainstreaming.

§  In the Ugandan context, efforts to disaggregate information by female and male-headed households had not been very useful because contrary to hypotheses indicating that female-headed households were poorer, studies had proved that the reverse was true. It was therefore recommended that focus should be on intra-household dynamics. Whereas this observation may hold water, participants held the opinion that interpretation of survey results required a better appreciation of: the kind of instruments used for data collection; who the respondents were; the environment within which the responses were obtained; and who actually administered the survey instruments.

§  Lack of conceptual clarity on gender mainstreaming. It was not clear to some participants whether the goal of gender mainstreaming was equity or equality and how this differed from the human rights approach. It was explained that the ultimate goal of gender mainstreaming was gender equality, and that equity (social justice) was only the means of realizing equality between women and men. Gender equality was noted to be a fundamental human rights principle enshrined in the Constitution of Uganda, as well as International Human Rights instruments.[4] It was further clarified that gender mainstreaming was not mutually exclusive from a human rights  approach, but rather a part of it. 

[Extracted from a report titled "Engendering Budgets, In-Country Training Workshops." The report was on a series of training workshops for Uganda Government staff on the necessity of engendering budgets. The training was one input in a process by the Uganda Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, towards creation of gender conducive environment for effecting gender mainstreaming in the budget making process and budgets. The workshops were facilitated by Edward H. Mhina. April 2003]

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[1]               Activities carried out in the household, mostly by women and children, but which do not bring additional income to the household (unpaid work)

[2]               In Uganda, FOWODE, a local NGO has been at the lead of GBI over the last three years

[3]               Refer to the reference guide- MFPED, Training Manual on Engendering Budgets for detailed explanations on these tools.

[4]               These include among others- UDHR, ICESCR, ICCPR,  and CEDAW.

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[1]      Session was done by Ms. Maggie Mabweijano, Assistant Commissioner, Gender and Community Development, MGLSD).

[2]               For instance see: Ester Boserup  ‘Women’s Role in Economic Development, 1970

[3]               The process of expanding human capacities, opportunities and choice

[4]               In the Ugandan context, the Poverty Eradication Action Plan

[5]               British Council Study of effective Leadership (2002)