3.14 Gender Responsive Budgeting in the Water Sectors

Introduction

Innumerable conventions, declarations, plans of action, and commitments have been made for women’s empowerment, for equality between women and men, for the cultural and economic rights of women and men, for the human rights of women and men, and for equality and equity in access to resources and in decision making power. Over the last 30 years, the water sectors have also made many such commitments.

While gender equality incorporating an intersectional analysis in water institutions and policies is beginning to take place, it has been slow. Furthermore, the implementation of these new inclusive and equitable policies of the last 10 to 20 years has been constrained by a range of factors - from the lack of political will and commitment, to the lack of an integrated approach to water resources management, to continued cultural, economic and political discrimination against women and girls.

Gender Responsive Budget Initiatives (GRBIs) provide concrete tools for putting conventions, policies, and commitments into practice.

GRBIs were developed in recognition of the gender blindness of macro-economic policies and budgets.1 The first gender-responsive budget was introduced in Australia in 1984. Macro-economic policies and budgets do not recognise women’s unpaid labour and thus do not recognise or value the different contributions of women to the national economy as compared to men’s contributions. The national budget is the key document to any country’s development priorities. If a government’s national budget is not gender-sensitive, it is most likely missing women’s roles and contributions to national development efforts and thus not serving women’s needs and priorities. Women and men in all countries have different roles and responsibilities and often unequal access and control over resources and decision making; thus, budgets affect them differently.

Gender-Responsive Budget Initiatives

Gender-Responsive Budget Initiatives (GRBIs) analyse policies, taxation, revenues, expenditures, and deficits from a gender perspective. They are tools that make it possible to analyse budgets to assess whether government policies and programmes will have different and unequal impacts on women and men and girls and boys. GRBIs are not about separate budgets for women and men. They involve a gender-sensitive analysis of budget priorities. The exercise enables an analysis of budgets rather than the formulation of budgets. This analysis can then constitute the basis for formulation of budget amendments. Additionally, the analysis does not focus only on that portion of a budget seen as pertaining to gender issues or women. A full gender budget analysis examines all sectoral allocations of governments for their differential impacts on women, men, girls and boys. They can go further and look at the sub-groups of the gender-age groupings (Budlender, 2000:1366).

While a change in the government budget is the ultimate objective of most GRBIs, many other gains can be made along the way. In particular, GRBIs are ways of enhancing democracy by enabling public participation and transparency in finance and decision making and improving governance. GRBIs allow government departments, non-governmental organisations, and other stakeholders to improve accountability and targeting of services, ensure that ministries and municipalities respond to their constituencies’ needs and priorities, ensure that policies are being implemented with the relevant budgetary allocations and assist in implementing government commitments to international conventions (Khosla, 2003:5).

Gender-Responsive Budgets in the Water Sectors

Putting water on the agenda for gender budget analysis can foster a sustainable and integrated water resources development and management approach as it also involves a multi-sectoral stakeholder approach to budget analysis. The call for GRBIs has been fuelled by the growing frustration with the slow response of senior decision makers and implementing agencies to address poor women’s needs and gender inequity in the water sectors. The Tanzania Gender Networking Programme (TGNP) in its pro-poor and gender-sensitive analysis of Tanzania’s National Budget (2003-2004) eloquently affirms the need for GRBIs. According to the TGNP, national budgets provide the truest indication of state priorities. The process of allocating scarce resources reveals the Government’s highest priorities and identifies their favoured constituents when decision-makers are forced to choose among the policy priorities. Whereas policies and budget guidelines provide standards and set the direction of goals, budgets actually demonstrate political will.2

Key Actors in the Sector: Who can do GRBIs?

Different levels of government and their relevant ministries and departments along with women’s groups and other civil society partners are key actors in gender-responsive budget initiatives. In countries where GRBIs are being used and have been the most successful, the exercise was led and coordinated by the relevant ministry, a women’s agency or NGO and/or a research centre or university. For case studies on GRBIs see the books produced by the Commonwealth Secretariat.3 These are not case studies about the water sectors, but a range of other sectors and levels of government where gender budget analysis was undertaken.

GRBIs for Gender Mainstreaming the Sector

GRBI tools such as the gender-disaggregated beneficiary assessment can assess current water and sanitation public services and their relationship to existing budgetary allocations. In cases of water privatisation, it could also assist in analysing the implications of pricing policies and their relationship to women’s and men’s incomes and access to public services. It can also demonstrate the need for budgetary re-allocations for the provision of water services to those who do not have them or are under-serviced. Such an exercise will highlight the lack of services or under-servicing of poor women and men, female-headed households, women without title to land, women and men with small land holdings, etc.

Disaggregated analysis of the impact of the budget on time use is a tool that can demonstrate how the time taken by women to undertake certain tasks that would normally be provided by the state are in fact a subsidy to the state. For example, women generally fill in shortcomings in services by investing more of their time to ensure that the basic needs of families and children are met. In cases where water becomes inaccessible, women spend longer hours in collecting water from more distant water sources, revert to water recycling and conservation methods, and invest more of their time towards meeting basic household needs. If calculated in monetary terms, the value of women’s time amounts to a considerable subsidy to a service that the state should primarily be responsible for providing.

Gender disaggregated public expenditure benefit incidence analysis is yet another useful tool. As privatisation of water usually excludes water and sanitation infrastructure, which is mainly left for government investment and loans, a beneficiary analysis of government expenditure would demonstrate the bias in government spending towards the rich. The rich consume more quantities of water for golf courses, swimming pools, and industry infrastructure, as compared to poor women who consume less water due to their different needs and their inability to pay for water.

Disaggregated tax incidence analysis enables the examination of taxation policies at the market and household levels. At the household level, women’s unpaid work in water provision and management constitutes both a social and economic tax. Even within a privatised water management context, sanitation mostly remains a government responsibility that uses revenues to finance these investments. In the market context, women in the informal sector and as owners of small enterprises pay taxes, regardless of whether water infrastructure is meeting their needs.

Few GRBIs have specifically focused on the many dimensions of the water sectors. For example, gender-responsive budgeting could be used for provision of water and sanitation services, equitable access to water for irrigation, or integrated water resources management (IWRM). GRBIs in South Africa have raised the issue of the lack of water services provision for many poor women in rural areas, along with the general lack of other basic services such as electricity. More recently, in Tanzania, the TGNP has demonstrated the usefulness of GRBIs in the analysis of the budget of the Ministry of Water and Livestock.4 The effectiveness of GRBI in areas such as gender violence and policing, agriculture, health services, education, taxation, pensions, food subsidy policies, and land distribution demonstrates its value for IWRM.

1 See the work of Diane Elson.

2 http://www.tgnp.org

3 See http://www.thecommonwealth.org/Templates/Colour.asp?NodeID=34006

4 For a case study on TGNP and GRBI with the Ministry of Water and Livestock see Section 7 of Gender and Water Technical Overview Paper PrabhaKhosla, Christine van Wijk, Joep Verhagen, and Viju James. IRC. December 2004. http://www.irc.nl/page/15499