Placing gender equality and women’s empowerment as central to budget reform is a strategic lever for significant change to women’s lives. This report forms the third phase of an evaluation of UNIFEM’s Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) programme and has three main purposes:
• To assess the extent of UNIFEM’s contribution to raising awareness and capacity building about gender budgets
• To extract good practices and inform UNIFEM’s strategic guidance for future programming on GRB
• To propose a typology of GRB programmes and to develop data systems and monitoring tools at a country level for different ‘types’ of programmes/projects.
The report begins with a broad overview of UNIFEM’s GRB work, and then maps the work through Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, Morocco and Egypt Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe.
A general conclusion drawn from this report is that the results achieved by the programme can be attributed to consistent efforts over time and particularly to considerable capacity building efforts, as is shown in the work in Egypt. Two examples from India and Bolivia show the need to both integrate gender budget initiatives at the local level and to provide support to integrate gender in national level policy. The author argues that this would suggest positive benefits to working simultaneously at the local and national levels. Recommendations made include: ensure that a rights based approach to GRB is consistently implemented in UNIFEM’s programmes. Partnerships are also identified as an area where there is a need for greater clarity on the respective roles of government and civil society and for a clear strategy for support.
(Adapted from author’s summary)