Financing for Gender Equality by Zohra Khan & Nalini Burn

Author:Zohra Khan & Nalini Burn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

(c) Should GRB be a whole-of-government approach or should it be applied to select ministries?

The third critical question that many countries have asked revolves around the appropriate scope of GRBIs—should GRB be applicable to the government in its entirety or should it be selectively applied to ministries.

The obvious pitfall of the latter approach is that there is a proclivity to focus on those ministries/sectors that are traditionally considered “women related” or “soft sectors”, i.e. the social sectors, mainly health, nutrition and education. This could be for many reasons including the fact that it is easier to analyse expenditure targeted to individuals and generate sex-disaggregated data for these sectors. As a result, mainstream sectors such as infrastructure, trade and industry remain untouched, despite the larger political call of gender advocates that no sector is gender neutral (See UN Women 2014b). Experiences from the region show that this approach tends to work better as an initial strategy for introducing GRB at the national level. By focusing on a few ministries, GRB practitioners are able to streamline their efforts to demonstrate the value added of this approach thereby creating a strong evidence base for further advocacy on GRB. Moreover, review of GRB work in the region suggests that even the so-called whole-of-government approaches often remain policy prescriptions. For instance in India, despite MoF guidelines since 2005–2006, the number of demand for grants has stagnated at 33 (out of total of 106) over the last few years.

The AP region provides some useful models to demonstrate that it may be prudent for governments to focus on a select few ministries in the initial years, but with a clear roadmap on how these efforts would be upscaled and sustained. However, this will be contingent on a range of factors including political and bureaucratic will and presence of champions. In Indonesia, for example, as per the National Strategy, the GBS was initiated with 10 Ministries in 2012, with the plan to include another 10 in 2013, and expand to all 34 Ministries by 2014. A slightly different entry point was used in Timor Leste where initially, with UN Women’s support, the focus was on Ministries and State Secretaries responsible for the implementation of the Law against Domestic Violence and/or National Action Plans on Gender Based Violence such as Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Social Solidarity, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health, Secretary of State for Security and the Ombudsmen for Human Rights and Justice. This was later extended to all ministries/sectors.

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