Gender responsive budgeting (GRB) is, as noted in the EU Gender Action Plan III, one of the tools to achieve gender equality. GRB focuses on how public funds are collected and spent and ensures that gender analysis is integral part of budgetary decision-making. In terms of applying GRB and promoting gender equality and women's empowerment across the world, the EU Gender Equality Strategy states that "In the EU's external policies, gender mainstreaming is applied in the budget process by ensuring that 85% of all new programmes contribute to gender equality and women's empowerment”.
The EU has been supporting GRB through the application of several different modalities, and rather extensively when different types of supports are combined. Most of the support has been extended through the technical assistance and budget support programmes that are dealing with Public Finance Management (PFM) reforms. Additionally, the EU contributed and cooperated with other international institutions and agencies in multi-donor trust funds or programmes that are working on specific gender and PFM issues. Key collaborators were agencies with complementary areas of expertise (in PFM, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and in gender expertise primarily UN-Women).
In 2023, DG INTPA and DG NEAR together undertook a mapping of GRB actions supported by the EU External Action for the period 2014-2022. Special attention was given to the use of GRB in social sectors (health, education, and social policy) and especially in relation to unpaid care work – which is a specific focus of the GAP III Joint Communication.
The mapping showed that the EU has been directly or indirectly involved in GRB initiatives in at least 47 partner countries, highlighting that the EU is an important player in GRB in a global context where 100 countries have implemented some form of gender-responsive PFM (UN Women, 2023).
Some key findings noted that the EU-led work on GRB has leveraged the EU’s comparative advantage, especially its multi-dimensional approach, the mix of aid modalities the EU uses and its political role. Around 36% of total GRB support has been delivered through PFM and budget support which shows the importance of the budget support instrument and the PFM sector in enhancing GRB. This approach has contributed to strategic results, such as GRB institutionalisation within PFM systems through the approval of government regulatory frameworks and procedures on GRB, introduction of GRB into the budget circulars, regular collection of gender-disaggregated data, ex-post gender analyses, and capacity-building of finance officials. This approach has also paved the way for the sustainability of GRB actions within PFM systems and processes.
Together with its partners, the EU achieved significant results contributing to the development of a new diagnostic tool for GRB (PEFA Gender) and gender mainstreaming in PFM tools (MAPS - Methodology for Assessing Procurement Systems). PEFA Gender has been used in 36 countries to date and it forms the basis for all the work on GRB by governments and other partners.
In addition, the cooperation with the IMF and UN Women has led to successful capacity-building of government officials around the world.
Language of conference: English
Language of Q&A session: English
