Committee lauds gender budgetting initiative

Page 11, July 28, 2009

Article: Emmanuel Adu-Gyamerah
THE Parliamentary Committee on Gender and Children has resolved to scrutinise future budgets of the country to ensure that the government’s policy of mainstreaming gender issues within national policies and programmes was given effect through the budgetary process.
The committee noted that it was through such actions that gender issues could be allocated adequate funding for effective programmes to be embarked upon for the achievement of the objectives of such gender issue.
Members of the committee gave their support to gender budgeting at the end of a three-day workshop at Koforidua during which gender activists briefed them about the need for budgets to address gender issues in the national budgets.
The workshop was organised and sponsored by the Parliamentary Centre, a Canadian non-governmental organisation under its Parliamentary Committee Support Project II.
The resolve of members of the committee was informed by the fact that national budgets encompass all issues of national priority and concern and there is no separate budget statement devoted to gender and women issues.
Again, the strategic and policy orientations under-pining budgets do not reflect interests and concerns based on gender and the best way of meeting the aspirations and needs of the majority of men, women, boys and girls was to engender budgets.
Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB), therefore focuses on the differences between women, men, girls and boys as well as the differences between the poor, rural, urban and the young and the old as well.
According to gender experts, a number of studies have come with empirical evidence that women in Ghana are poorer and more vulnerable than their male counterparts.
Women have less access to paid employment, income-generating activities, healthcare and education among other social and economic opportunities.
Although attempts have been made to develop responsive policy measures in the national strategic agenda such as the Vision 2020 and the GPRS I and II, not much have been done to address these inequalities.
Gender experts have, therefore challenged the Parliamentary Gender Committee to use its oversight responsibility to come out with a league table as to which of the ministries is responsive to gender issues.
Speaking at the workshop on the role of the Ministry of Women and Children on Gender Budgeting, the Acting Director of the Department of Women, Mrs Francesca Pobee-Hayford stated that the 2009-2011 budget guidelines/circulars clearly indicated that all ministries should start gathering sex disaggregated data as part of preparation towards their budgets.
She identified the lack of critical mass of technical people with the knowledge and skills to support the initiative, lack of ownership of the initiative and non-availability of sex disaggregated data among others as challenges confronting the programme.
For his part, Mr Fusheini Adams of the Parliamentary Centre called on both Parliament and the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning effectively play their respective roles to ensure that ministries, departments and agencies (MDA) do proper planning and spending so that the scarce national resources were used to reduce poverty.
He stated that there was the need for more resources to be spent to where they were needed to address gender issues.
Mrs Gifty Ohene-Konadu, Member of Parliament (MP) for Asante Akim South and Ranking Member of the committee in her remarks noted that programmes should be designed to popularised the GRB concept.
The Chairman of the committee and MP for Juaboso, Mr Sampson Ahi thanked the Parliamentary Centre for their assistance and said that members of the committee had been sensitised during the workshop to enable them play their oversight role in ensuring that future budgets were gender responsive.
He gave assurance that efforts would be made to bring ministers, particularly the Minister of Finance on board to ensure that the country’s budgets responds to gender concerns.