1. WOMEN AND GENDER BUDGETING: NIGERIA’S POLICY ALTERNATIVE
Adeyeye, M.M. and Akinbami, C.A.O.
Being paper presentation at
Enterprise Promotion Convention
Harrogate
From 15 – 17 November 2009

2. Overview… Introduction Objective
What is gender budgeting, aims and strategies?
Approach and Methodology
Overview of Gender Budgeting Initiatives in Nigeria and some selected countries in West and East Africa
Conclusion and recommendation

3. Introduction…
Budget is an important policy instrument for achieving sustained economic and social developmental process in any country
Budget is also a useful to respond to the challenge of poverty
However, gender inequity and inequality has remained pervasive in many spheres of life worldwide.
In most societies, access to resources, rights, power, and distribution of wealth are unequally distributed between women and men.
As a result, legislation to combat discrimination and promote equal treatment has been passed and gender equality policy machineries have been set up to monitor the situation.

4. Approach…
Strategists combines the strength of these two paradigms and also avoids their pitfalls.
Sen and Nussbaum’s capability approach extends the focus of gender auditing to the impact of policies on well–being, with its multiple dimensions and complexity, starting from an evaluation based exclusively on income or commodities.
This work was approached using strategist paradigm in combination with Sen and Nussbaum’s capability approach by different items of public budgets suggested by Addabbo (2008).

5. Introduction…Contd
Gender mainstreaming is a strategy identified as one of the new approaches, new strategies and new methods needed to reach the goal of gender relevance in national development.
Gender mainstreaming is defined as follows (COE, 2005):
the (re)organisation, improvement, development and evaluation of policy processes, so that a gender equality perspective is incorporated in all policies at all levels and all stages, by the actors normally involved in policy-making.
Also, gender budgeting is one of the ways identified for analyzing the effects of policy decisions on women and men by assessing the distribution of financial resources and their benefits for men and women.
The objective of this paper is therefore to apply gender budgeting analysis to gender development process with focus on Nigeria, some selected countries in West and East Africa

6. What is gender budgeting, aims and strategies?
Gender budgeting is a tool for identifying decisions and choices in budgeting processes, which could prove to be disadvantageous to either male or female, most often because the socioeconomic realities of the men and the women were not taken in consideration with the aim of assessing gendered impacts of government budgets . 
It has been observed globally that though real equality between women and men has not been achieved in any country to date, but one important achievement thus far as it relates to women is the greater presence of women in public life.
The slow progress and differences in gender equality are based on traditional and deep-rooted prejudices reflected in the norms and regulations of institutions and in government policies.
And sometimes due to resistance, which delays the rapid incorporation of international agreements in national legislation.

7. Approach…
The strategy adopted for this paper was to look at the concepts of gender, feminism, women empowerment and gender budgeting by analyzing three policy paradigms.
These policy paradigms are incrementalist, rationalist and strategist.
While incrementalist focuses on the process of a public policy i.e. how the policy process works in a specific field – and attempts to describe the process objectively, rationalist focuses on prescribing better ways of making and implementing policies, regardless of the substantive issues and areas that the public policy may address.

8. Methodology
In strategic planning policy analysis helps us to derive quantification of gendered progress, particularly by women, based on collective decisions using the national or sub-national budget as instrument of resource allocation to their well-being.
The capability approach helps us to define the indicators of well-being serviced by the budgetary allocation for the citizenry.
To examine the well-being of women in these countries in the context of these two approaches, the indicators featured include: enrolment of students in school, gender equality/inequality in economic activity, women political participation and gender empowerment measure.

9. School enrolment information
Factor
Ethiopia
Kenya
Uganda
Nigeria
Senegal
Cote d’ Ivoire
Ghana
School entry age (Years)
Pry 7 6
Sec 13 12
Ter 17 18 19
Intake Ratio
GPI-Pry
0.82
0.97
1.00
0.84
1.01
GPI-Sec
0.99
0.98
0.96
GPI-Ter
Public expndt profile on edu
As % of GDP
3.77
6.33
3.84 na
3.88
4.63
5.43
As % of total govt expndt
12.52
23.50
18.29
21.78
21.54
Per pupil as % GDP/ cap
22.42
26.16
15.24
27.48
29.61
25.27

10. Gender inequality in economic activity
Country
Ethiopia
Kenya
Uganda
Nigeria
Senegal
Cote d’ Ivoire
Ghana
Population
79.0m
35.6m
28.9m
141.4m
11.8m
18.6m
22.5m
HDI
0.411
0.521
0.505
0.47
0.499
0.432
0.553
HDI Rank
169
148
154
158
156
166
135
Female economic activity (aged 15yr – older (2005)
Rate (%)
Index
As % of
Male Rate
70.8 98 79
69.1 93 78
79.7 99 92
45.4 95 53
56.3 69
38.8 89 44
70.3 94
Employment by economic activity
Agric Women: Men
91 : 94
16 : 20
77 : 60
2 : 4
- : -
50 : 60
Industry Women :Men
3 : 3
10 : 23
5 : 11
11 : 30
- : -
15 : 14
Services Women: Men
6 : 3
75 : 57
17 : 28
87: 67
- : -
36 : 27

11. Women political participation
Country
Ethiopia
Kenya
Uganda
Nigeria
Senegal
Cote d’ Ivoire
Ghana
Women in govt
ministerial level%
5.9
10.3
23.4 10
20.6
17.1
11.8
Seats in parliament held by women (%)
Lower House 1990:2007
0:21.9
1.1 :7.3
122 : 29.8
- : 6.4
12.5 : 19.2
5.7: 8.5
- : 10.9
Upper House 2007
18.8 -
7.3

12. Gender empowerment measure: achieving equality for all women and men %
Country
Ethiopia
Kenya
Uganda
Nigeria
Senegal
Cote d’ Ivoire
Ghana
Seat in parliament by Women (% of total)
21.4
7.3
29.8 -
19.2
8.5
10.9
Female Legislator etc (% of total) 20
Ratio of estimated F: M earned income
0.60
0.83
0.70
0.41
0.54
0.32
0.71
Female professionals & technical workers (% of total) 30

13. Conclusion and Recommendation
This paper examined the current system of gender budgeting in Nigeria and some countries in East and West Africa
It is observed however that the policy process in gender budgeting among them need to pay more attention to gender issues from budget planning and implementation.
This is anticipated to lead to reducing degrees of gender disparity
The paper therefore concluded by recommending the following:
An increase in women participation in budgetary debate and decision making is crucial.
The relevance of the HDI Ranking of each country should be considered by her government in putting in place an appropriate gender budget policy.
Gender audit of plans, policies and programmes should be conducted on a regular basis

14. Thank you for your attention