Gender Responsive Budgeting: A crucial tool for the accountability agenda
A women’s group in discussion. Photo: Shahidi Wa Maji
It’s no secret that in many settings around the world, water collection is ‘women’s work’, and falls under women’s unpaid domestic labour, often overlooked in the realm of male-dominated public policy making. Women and girls are responsible for water collection in eight out of ten households with water off premises, and gender disparities are often stark - in South Sudan, 82% of domestic water collection is undertaken by women and girls. This daily labour eats into the time available for education, paid employment, and other activities, and poses numerous risks, including the risk of sexual violence. Yet if it is women and girls whose lives are most intimately connected with water, whether for washing, cooking, drinking, or cultivation, it is men who tend to retain ultimate authority in key decisions of water governance. Women are rarely represented in water ministries or technical water management roles, and their experiences often go unheard or unheeded. Stronger accountability can help bridge these gaps, exposing the gendered dimensions of water provision, and strengthening the voice of those historically excluded from key arenas of power.
The global evidence review includes insights on gender from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with most evidence concentrated in Ethiopia, India, and Tanzania. Eighteen out of 151 papers were coded as having a gender focus, with most attention given to social accountability mechanisms. It demonstrates how the use of accountability mechanisms, such as participatory situation analysis and gender responsive budgeting (GRB), can deliver a double win, improving governance and service delivery processes while transforming broader attitudes and perceptions around persistent gender inequalities globally.
Evidence points to GRB as a particularly promising tool in alerting both communities and policymakers to the specific and differentiated needs of women and girls, and how this should inform the disbursement of material resources. Women and non-binary people are often motivated to participate but silenced or excluded by sexist and patriarchal structures that impede their participation, including conservative or religious norms around gender roles, the domination of decision making spaces by men, and additional domestic and care responsibilities placed on women that limits their time available to participate. This is especially the case in poor households, since conditions of economic precarity and exploitation often accentuate gender inequalities and increase the burden of domestic labour. However, under the Ethiopia Social Accountability Programme undertaken from 2012-15, GRB displayed a transformative potential to reshape social attitudes and foster more equitable outcomes in budget allocations, as women gained a platform to give voice to their needs and experiences, and men demonstrated an increasing willingness to listen and reflect on hitherto overlooked concerns. Participatory gender budgeting was applied to almost a quarter of woredas (districts) in the country, creating space for communities to assess the standards and budgets of basic services they received, prioritise necessary improvements, engage in dialogue with service providers and local government, and push forward on reforms that would redistribute resources towards more equitable outcomes.
A comprehensive review of the programme by Nass et al. (2018) highlights the transformative impact GRB can have across programmes if sustained pressure, proper explanation and training is provided. Through participatory processes, the programme ‘brought abstract gender equality policies to life’ (p.33), translating them into forms which were meaningful and relevant to communities, and provided men and women, service providers, and policymakers practical tools to reduce gender inequalities in WASH service provision. The authors draw on multiple interviews and survey data to evaluate the project, and conclude that gender responsive accountability mechanisms had a dramatic impact in transforming public attitudes and political priorities. With the necessary training and leadership championing gender responsive budgeting, both men and women participated and enthusiastically embraced its potential. After gender policy analyses by experts and consultants, there was also greater buy-in from government staff. The result was an upgrading of sector action plans, with revised budget allocations to recognise the specificities of women and girls’ needs and experiences.
Despite these positive results, the literature emphasised the need for gender sensitive education and training and close cooperation with locally embedded groups if the potential of such mechanisms was to be realised. Another paper examining GRB in Ethiopia highlighted the need for gender awareness training and women-only focus groups, since cultural norms discouraged women from speaking at public gatherings attended by men. These dedicated spaces allowed for women’s voices to be heard more clearly and be more appreciated and respected by communities as a whole.
Such positive encounters with accountability tools and processes demonstrates the value they can have, but for sustained and lasting change they must become embedded as part of broader shifts away from patriarchal values, norms and attitudes. More practical steps are therefore needed to move towards equal representation and tackle the domination of decision-making spaces by men. This includes incentivising and nurturing female leadership, and increasing their representation, power and influence in the realm of public policy, and in key decision-making arenas including water committees, water utilities, and other water authorities. Much of this work is already underway, but if real progress is to be made, it must be elevated to the centre of accountability practice.