Gender Budgeting: A Pathway towards Gender Equality Realization

When I was a delegate for a Model United Nations (MUN) competition this August, I got a chance to bring up the issue of women's economic empowerment in the changing world of work. Acting as a representative of one's country, the other delegates and I were being asked to craft a resolution to achieve the empowerment of women all over the world in economic aspects. 

One key component of the resolution is the creation of funding mechanisms to support all the solutions that we had proposed. As we all may know, budgeting process tends to be connected with men's political domination. 

There has never been any classification of policy that takes into consideration on how it may affect women in general, most policies only talk about whether it will help the poor and the marginalized or not, but never in terms of gender. Through gender budgeting, it can actually correct the pre-existing flaws.

In regards of funding mechanism that I included in my resolution was about gender budgeting, which is a gender based assessment of budgets incorporating a gender perspective at all levels of the budgetary process and restructuring revenues and expenditures in order to promote gender equality. 

Also, Chakraborty in 2014 inferred that gender budgeting is an approach to fiscal policies and administration that translates gender-related commitments into fiscal commitments through identified processes, resources, and institutional mechanisms, impacting both the spending and revenue sides of the budget.  

Many countries, especially the ones that are part of the OECD, have implemented this kind of budget assessment and the governments of those countries said that the implementation of this has successfully made a much better difference in terms of ensuring gender equality at all levels in one nation.

We are all aware that in order for us to achieve the agenda of Sustainable Development Goals 2030, the world needs to realize 17 goals in which two of those goals are related to gender issues, which are gender equality and reduced inequalities. Gender budgeting, in trying to uphold the principles of gender equality in the policymaking process, may assist directly in the achievement of those goals.

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Since its first introduction by the Australian Government in 1984, gender budgeting has always  been acclaimed to be an effective toolkit in applying a gender perspective in the policymaking process. The process that has been incorporated in gender budgeting allows government to better understand how revenue and spending, as well as the policies guiding the budget may affect women and men differently. 

It also doesn't stop within the sphere of what kind of policies do the government make that will actually affect the gender mainstreaming process, but also to the extent of ensuring the equal opportunity for both women and men to participate in the policy-making process, especially regarding the incorporation of gender perspective into various policies. 

In India for example, they have implemented the four phases of gender budgeting which include  knowledge building and networking, institutionalizing, capacity building, and enhancing accountability.