Annual Report 2008

UNIFEM: gender-responsive budgeting

In Cochabamba, Bolivia, many men have left to seek better prospects abroad, creating a shortage of skills that are traditionally performed by men. Now the women of Cochabamba are learning to fill that gap. Financed by the municipal government, they learn how to be carpenters and brick layers, and earn a decent living for themselves and their children. While the women are at work, their children are taken care of in a sports programme catering equally to boys and girls, also paid for by the local government. Both initiatives are the result of a new focus on gender-responsive budgeting in Cochabamba.

In Bolivia, the 1994 Law of Popular Participation established participatory development of local development plans and vigilance committees as two of the main citizenship participation mechanisms at local level. Supported by UNIFEM, the Instituto de Formación Femenina Integral (IFFI) of Cochabamba has mobilized and trained members of local women’s organizations to use these opportunities to bring a gender perspective into local public policies. As a result of IFFI’s advocacy campaign, municipal budgetary guidelines now require budgetary resources to be allocated to programmes that promote gender equality and provide services for victims of violence.

For the past eight years, UNIFEM, which is administered by UNDP, has contributed to building the capacity of governments and women’s organizations to incorporate gender into budgetary processes in over 30 countries, at times in collaboration with UNDP. Initially, UNIFEM’s efforts focused on making gender budgeting tools and methodologies available and increasing stakeholders’ skills and knowledge to advocate for and carry out gender budget analysis. Since 2005, emphasis has been placed on ensuring that national budgeting processes adequately reflect the priorities of poor women.

Initiatives in Ecuador, Morocco, Mozambique, and Senegal aim to make budget processes and policies more responsive to principles of gender equality and allocate resources in line with poor women’s priorities. In Morocco, this has led to annual gender reports which accompany the national budgets and spell out how the allocation of public resources through the Government’s departments will address gender equality priorities. In 2007, 19 different departments detailed their plans in this gender report.

As decentralization raises the role of local governments in serving their constituencies, UNIFEM is supporting local gender-responsive budget initiatives. Local initiatives have been carried out in six Latin American countries – Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru – as well as in India, Morocco, the Philippines and Uganda.