By Eze Onyekpere
An important governance framework and advocacy perspective is the quest to make the budget gender responsive, especially in the context of freedom from gender-based violence (GBV). Budgets affect men and women differently because of their respective roles, contributions and societal expectations. Gender is seen as the way in which roles, attitudes, values and relationships regarding women and men are constructed by societies all over the world. It seeks to answer the question; how does society construct opportunities and life chances. A differentiation is thus made as to biological or natural roles and society made roles that are not necessarily tied to any real need, necessity or human logical framework. Biological roles may be difficult to change but socially constructed roles can be changed.
Sex and biological roles have remained the same throughout history while gender roles change with history and as society changes. Furthermore, policies respond to sex differentiation in any area related to the physical body, for example, childbearing while policies can either respond to gender stereotypes and traditional gender roles (for example), paying benefits on the assumption that households are headed by men) or attempt to change them (for example), taking into account the barriers to women and girls participating in non-traditional training courses. But the terminologies for a gender transformative budget have been shifting vis, “Women’s budget” and “gender budget”. But the current insistence is on gender instead of specifically addressing women. The Commonwealth Plan of Action on Gender and Development provides a clue: “Whereas previous efforts have sought to address women’s rights and needs under special and separate development programmes, the gender and development approach seeks to integrate women’s needs into the wider picture, calling for the different life courses of men and women to be considered at an early stage and emphasising the need to monitor the different impact of policies and programmes on women and men, girls and boys. The shift in focus from women to gender recognises that the status of women cannot be treated as a separate issue; it can only be addressed by considering the status of both sexes”.
The first question that arises in the quest to make a budget gender sensitive or gender transformative is that of defining the contours of a gender sensitive or transformative budget. Gender transformative budgeting refers to a number of processes, tools and techniques used to assess the impact of government budgets on men, women, boys and girls. It is not a separate budget for women and men but it is used as a basis for ascertaining “who is benefiting what” or who is suffering public resource allocation prejudice and discrimination. This inevitably leads to advocacy for the re-ordering of budgetary expenditure and redefinition of priorities, in favour of marginalised and poor segments of society. This would take cognisance of women’s disadvantaged position because women constitute a greater percentage of persons living in poverty. However, it needs to be noted that budgets are presented as aggregate figures without reference to men and women, boys and girls. Essentially, it is portrayed as a neutral economic instrument that respects no gender or sex. This leads to what experts have described as gender blindness in budgeting, policy formulation, implementation and evaluation. But human experiences make a case for the need to target specific groups and vote resources to address their special challenges. An example is the scenario where the Police and other law enforcement agents may have resources targeted at responding to violence for all persons, statistics may be indicating an upsurge in a special type of violence directed at women and girls simply because they are women. In such circumstance, there would be the need to specifically respond to GBV.
It is a fact of life that formal guarantees of equality in law and policy make no meaning when substantial and structural inequalities prevent sections of the society from accessing otherwise non-discriminatory services. A gender transformative budget analysis will examine the outputs and the results that emanate from an otherwise neutral budgetary provision to determine the impact on men and women. It will proceed in accordance with the fundamental tenets of justice which demands that like cases are treated alike and unlike cases are differentiated and treated in accordance with their differentiation. Thus, designing the budget and the underpinning macroeconomic policy in a way that meets the rights and needs of women, men, girls and boys is fundamental to making the budgeting process gender transformative. To ignore the different impact on men and women and to pretend that these differences do not exist is to be gender blind rather than merely being gender neutral.
A budgeting process that refuses to take cognisance of gender differentials, especially in matters of GBV will suffer from the following deficits. One Half Marginalised: Women make up to 49% of the Nigerian population. The majority of one half of the population that have a great stake in the economy are treated as non-stakeholders and are marginalised. Development is about human beings who are not just passive observers but active participants. These are the same people who should be the means and end of development. It is recognised that people develop by themselves contributing and owning the process and not by the benevolence of others or being made invisible in the computation of contributions to the economy. A gender blind budget is not an inclusive process but rather, it excludes a critical constituency. This indirectly gives legitimacy to gender stereotypes that fuels GBV thereby plunging the already disadvantaged half of the population backwards.
Onyekpere writes from Lagos