Challenges and Limiting factors in Gender Budgeting

Various challenges remain in implementing gender budgeting and accepting the analysis generated by these processes:

♤ Collection of sex-disaggregated data: There is some sex-disaggregated data available but there is a need to generate more information in order to shed more light on the differences between women and men, girls and boys, particularly in access to resources, opportunities and security without which it is not possible to integrate a gender perspective in the budget process.

♤ Limited evidence connecting analysis with policy & budget changes as most of the gender budgeting initiatives worldwide are at the stage of analysis.

♤ Limitation of parliamentary intervention: Legislatures, in partnership with gender experts and civil society groups, have sometimes played an important advocacy role in various countries but the role of legislatures in the budget process is often confined to budgetary approval and oversight and not involved in formulation and execution

♤ Political will to institutionalise gender budgeting: Gender budgeting requires political will, adequate resources and capacity to support a process of transforming the traditional budget-making and policy processes by removing long-standing, in-built biases which disadvantage women and girls.