Gender Budgeting: A Pathway towards Gender Equality Realization

These phases have resulted in several successful outcomes in realizing gender equality, such as in terms of enhancing accountability, the Government of India has published a Report on Gender Budgeting in the State Finance Account that can show the actual money spent on women in nation's policies. 

There are definitely no way to know how gender budgeting can be used best, but governments usually pull the levers through two major aspects of their fiscal scope, which are tax measures and direct expenditures. 

Tax measures can be used in aiming which taxed area needs to be looked-into further and the direct expenditures will assess the need to consider the allocation of budgeting towards welfare, social protection program, and so on. Gender budgeting mainly has two kinds of assessment that are widely practiced: ex ante assessment and ex post assessment. 

While ex ante assessment focuses more on the planning side that identifies gender-related needs in various policies, ex post assessment focuses more on the auditing or the measure of achievement to determine if gender equality is already effectively promoted or attained through the policies.

Ex ante assessment considers several actions that need to be done to ensure the policies that the government made is gender sensitive, which consist of making a gender budget baseline analysis, undertaking gender needs assessments across different policy areas, and also conducting impact assessment of proposed policies toward gender equality. 

Sweden, as one of the countries that are already implementing ex ante assessment, believes that gender equality perspective and analysis have to be included in their Budget Bill and they have already established mechanism on how to conduct gender equality analysis in their budgeting process. 

The mechanism that is being implemented in Sweden from the analysis of gender equality relevance to the survey execution and ends with impact assessment that will determine whether alternative solutions will be needed or not. 

From this mechanism, the government of Sweden has made some reforms regarding some of their policies with one of them being the reform made for sa Regnr's areas, which will include the commitment of the government to form gender equality agency in 2018 and present new national strategy to combat men's violence against women.

For theex post assessment phase or the 'after-implementation' phase, it will typically be conducted to measure whether the implemented policies have reached their intended outcomes, especially regarding their aim to realize gender equality. 

The mechanism included contains budget auditing and spending review that incorporate gender perspective in their process. Gender budget auditing and spending review will measure and analyze to what extent gender equality has been attained through various policies set out in the annual budget as well as will be in charge to determine if implemented policies are already effective and efficient in mentioning and delivering gender objectives. 

Through this robust mechanism, governments will be able to find possible loopholes as well as identify ways to improve existing gender-related policies.