Sufficient Financing For Gender Equality

The importance of sufficient financing for gender equality and women’s empowerment cannot be overstated. During the last ten years, 50 countries have launched the gender-responsive budgeting. But changes in budget policies and allocation are slow, with very little measurable impact. This week, representatives of member governments of the United Nations come together in New York to participate in the 52nd Session of the Commission on the Status of Women. The discussions focus on
financing for gender equality and empowerment of women. They identified that a big obstacle to achieving gender-targeted financing is the lack of a political will by political leaders, the majority of which are men. “Men just turn off when they hear the term gender equality believing it meant women fighting only for their representation not equally representation of both men and women” says one delegate. Most politicians are not gender-sensitive; they sometimes claimed that they could not include gender in their projects because women and men must be treated equally and that gender inequality is not an obstacle to development. The false assumption that men and women act the same way as economic agent and benefit equally from the provision of public goods has produced the “neutral” character of Government budget. This false belief is another obstacle to gender-sensitive budgeting. Without being able to exercise their sexual and reproductive rights, and without access to adequate sexual and reproductive health services, women stand little chance of having the same opportunities as the men. Investment in reproductive health is key to a sustainable social and economic development, and to the protection and promotion of human rights. What gender-sensitive financing really aimed at are the reform of a country’s public sector finance and the fairer distribution of wealth. It is important, therefore, for governments to examine all policies from tax laws to general budgets through a “gender –lens” in order to ensure that the gender perspective is mainstreamed across budget procedure, law drafting and other major project from the very beginning. This will require the Ministry of Finance of each country to develop a national system of “gender-budgeting” in order to establish coherence between economic and social policies to achieve a long-term objective of gender equality, democracy, and sustainable development.

Filed under Gender Issues, United Nations |