Nepal

Article by Krishna Hari Baskota, Revenue Secretary Ministry of Finance of Nepal.

The original article was published in Nepali in the Kathmandu Post, daily Newspaper. The English translation of this article has been extensively edited.

Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) seeks to ensure that the needs and interest of women and men from different groups are addressed in governments’ budget. GRB is therefore one of the most effective tools to mainstream gender in policies and plans, to redress inequalities and to promote women's economic, social and political rights.

GRB was formally introduced in Nepal in the fiscal year 2007/2008, under the leadership of the Ministry of Finance. In recent years, the Ministry has put a great emphasis on the importance of making deliberate efforts to translate policies aimed at addressing gender inequalities into targeted and funded programs and to track public expenditures from a gender perspective. The government of Nepal has sought to integrate a gender perspective in the development policy framework through important initiatives including gender audit of line ministries, gender assessments, awareness-raising, gender training programmes at all levels of government and the establishment of a Gender Focal Point system.

The country's Tenth Poverty Reduction Plan and the Three Year Interim Plan (TYIP) highlight gender equality and women�'s empowerment as a key development objective and gender mainstreaming as an operational strategy to meet this objective. Women's significant contribution to the national economy is also consistently recognized in the annual budget speech.

As part of broader efforts to institutionalize GRB in Nepal, a Gender Responsive Budget Committee has been established within the Ministry of Finance and placed under the coordination of a Joint-Secretary from the Budget Division of the Ministry of Finance. The GRB committee includes representatives from the National Planning Commission, Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare, Ministry of Local Development and UNIFEM.  The committee has been mandated to design a GRB methodology that can be applied at sectoral level to monitor budget allocations and public expend itures from a gender perspective; to assess the impact of development policies on women and men; and to provide sectoral ministries with policy guidelines for the application of GRB.

The Finance Ministry uses five indicators to analyze budget allocations from a gender perspective. All five indicators (listed below) are assigned an equal weight of 20% each:

• Women's capacity development,
• Women's participation in programme formulation and implementation,
• Benefit incidence of public expenditures on women,
• Support to women's employment and income generation,
• Positive impact on women's time use and care work.

In compliance with this system, sectoral ministries are required to categorize their programmes budgets according to the extent to which they support gender equality.

The three prescribed categories are:

• Directly responsive indicates more than 50% of the allocation directly benefiting women
• Indirectly responsive indicates 20-50%
• Neutral indicates less than 20% benefiting women.

For instance, the total budget for the current fiscal year (2009/2010) amounts to 286 billion Rupees, out of which 49.00 billion Rupees, approximately 17.3%, has been identified as allocation for programmes directly benefiting women. The share of indirectly gender-responsive allocations amounts to 104.16 billion Rupees that is 36.4% of the total budget. Finally, the proportion of the total budget that has been termed gender neutral is estimated at 132.32 billion Rupees representing 46.3%. These figures provide valuable data for policy making purposes and indicate that more efforts are needed to make future budgetary processes more gender responsive.

This budget categorization has facilitated the establishment of a monitoring system that allows greater institutional accountability for implementing gender mainstreaming, the strengthening of result oriented management and the continued use of gender budget analysis to inform planning and programming.

The sectors with the most important gender responsive budget allocations are Women, Children and Social Welfare, Education, Health, Local Development, Infrastructure, Industry, Commerce and Supply, Culture and Tourism, Agriculture, Forest Preservation, Science and Technology and Governance Reform.

Review of Gender Responsive Budget Allocations from 2007 to 2010

Producing a gender responsive national budget requires a comprehensive approach, tools and a structure capable of influencing budget processes at different levels. In this regard, the establishment of a Gender Responsive Budget Committee in the Ministry of Finance represents an important step towards mainstreaming gender in macroeconomic policies in Nepal. Parallel to this, the Ministry of Finance has revised budget formats, planning guidelines, manuals and related software to make them compatible with GRB approaches. In addition, the Ministry has conducted training and orientation programmes for officials of sectoral ministries. The effectiveness of budget execution depends on the nature and the quality of the monitoring process: what is monitored and how is it monitored.

It is expected that the government of Nepal will continue its efforts towards achieving gender equality through the application of GRB. The GRB initiative in Nepal is supported by UNIFEM.