"Gender Planning and Budgeting (GPB) analyzes the impact of government expenditure and revenue on women and girls, as compared to men and boys, and is fast becoming a global movement to build accountability for national policy commitments to women." — UNIFEM 2001 Annual Report: 17
Gender responsive budgeting helps to track the way that budgets respond to women’s priorities and the way that governments use funds to reduce poverty, promote gender equality, reverse the spread of HIV and lower the rates of maternal and child mortality.
It helps to ensure government accountability to the commitments made to women in the Cairo Programme of Action on Population and Development and the Beijing Platform for Action for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, and to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Through development and application of various tools and techniques, women’s budgets can make a number of crucial contributions. These include efforts to:
- Recognize, reclaim and revalue the contributions and leadership that women make in the market economy, and in the reproductive or domestic (invisible and undervalued) spheres of the care economy, the latter absorbing the impact of macroeconomic choices leading to cuts in health, welfare and education expenditures;
- Promote women’s leadership in the public and productive spheres of politics, economy, and society, in parliament, business, media, culture, religious institutions, trade unions and civil society institutions;
- Engage in a process of transformation to take into account the needs of the poorest and the powerless;
- Build advocacy capacity among women’s organizations on macroeconomic issues.
UNFPA Egypt supports the National Council for Women in promoting gender mainstreaming in national planning at the national and local levels and monitoring and evaluation of gender projects in the 29 governorates. The program also provides training on Gender Budgeting and Performance-Based Budgeting for Central Ministry personnel and planners on the governorate level.