Gender Responsive Budgeting

Overview

Adequate and sustained domestic public funding is essential for ending violence against women and girls (EVAWG). Gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) can be an important tool to ensure that public financial management and budget planning promote sufficient resources for EVAWG.

Gender-responsive budgeting is not about making ‘budgets for women’, or a 50/50 division of expenditure for men and women. Instead, it is a continuous process of making budgets work for everyone by ensuring the equitable distribution of resources. It is an approach which systematically integrates gender equality objectives into government policy, planning, budgeting, monitoring, evaluation, and audits. It highlights the distributive impacts of budgets (both revenue and expenditure) on different groups of people, and seeks to ensure that all groups benefit from government resources. As part of this, gender-responsive budgets help ensure that policies and spending do not create, maintain, or exacerbate inequalities.

Budgets define government policy and political priorities. Public financial management processes involve a range of stakeholders. In many countries, the executive branch of government manages the budget process, with leadership from the Ministry of Finance. Parliaments may be required to approve budgets. When the fiscal year ends and the budget has been implemented, an independent audit of the budget is often completed to determine whether the funds were spent for the purposes intended by parliament. Gender-responsive budgets support gender equity, accountability to women’s rights, efficiency and transparency across these stakeholders and processes.

Guiding Principles

Intersectionality & Leaving No One Behind

Approach and Learning

In a time of shrinking fiscal space and decreased aid budgets, domestic public resources represent a critical avenue to maintain progress on gender equality. Gender-responsive budgeting is a key enabler for long-term resourcing and the sustainable delivery of EVAWG activities. National budgets are one of the most important policy tools of a government, because they impact the implementation of all other policies, laws and services. Domestic public funds offer a potentially more stable and greater source of finance for EVAWG, surpassing private flows and foreign aid.

Increasing domestic resources for EVAWG through gender-responsive budgeting can generate lasting change and directly delivers on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG Indicator 5.c.1: Proportion of countries with systems to track and make public allocations for gender equality and women’s empowerment). A range of activities can support increased domestic resources for gender equality and EVAWG, including:

Gender analysis: Analysis of how the budget addresses the needs of different social groups is an important starting point for gender-responsive budgeting. Data should demonstrate the impact of budgetary measures and related policies on gender equality, including their role in reducing or exacerbating inequalities.
Building capacity: Technical assistance (TA) and strengthening the capacity to budget for, and monitor, EVAWG and gender equality spending among government officials, parliamentarians, and civil society organisations (CSOs).
Advocacy: Media, advocacy and awareness campaigns targeted towards political leaders and policymakers can build understanding and increase momentum for increased spend and accountability around decision making.
Coordination and collaboration: Meetings and coordination mechanisms can bring together different government entities to identify, act on and track their contributions to gender equality and EVAWG. Gender-responsive budgeting processes can bridge different government departments, and bring together connect statistics offices, treasuries, and line ministries at national and local levels.

Top Tips

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Build linkages with influential officials

Establish cross-sectoral coalitions

Provide technical assistance and training

Engage at the local level

Support strong monitoring systems

Case Studies

Uganda's District Level Budgeting

In Uganda, responsibility for budgeting is shared across national, parliamentary, and district levels. Yet at the district level, where budgets are implemented, gender-based violence (GBV) was largely seen as the responsibility of a single office: the Community Development Office. This approach risked limiting resources for GBV, despite strong national policy commitments.

Spotlight Initiative brought together a wide range of district ministries, departments, and agencies, reframing GBV as a shared governance priority rather than a standalone social issue that was only the responsibility of the CDO. This shift laid the foundation for more coordinated, cross-sectoral budgeting and planning.

Spotlight Initiative expanded pre-existing gender equity budgeting trainings to reach parliamentarians and district government officials. Parliamentarians were supported to identify gender-responsive budget line items and better understand how public resources were already being allocated. At the district level, officials were trained to assess their budgets against gender and equity compliance requirements and to integrate GBV priorities into District Local Action Plans.

To strengthen sustainability and institutional capacity, Spotlight Initiative provided technical assistance to the Ministry of Public Service’s Civil Service College to develop online learning modules on gender-responsive planning and budgeting (GRPB) for district officials. These efforts reinforced the implementation of Uganda’s 2015 Public Finance Management Act, which mandates gender and equity budgeting across all national expenditures.

The results were clear. District government departments, that had never previously budgeted for GBV began allocating dedicated funds to address it. Across six Spotlight-supported districts, gender and equity compliance of district budgets increased, translating national policy commitments into concrete financial action at the local level.