News:
December 23, 2011
Selected Members of Parliament were on Thursday educated on Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) to enable them consider gender issues when planning the national budget.
Gender Responsive Budgeting is a kind of budget that prioritises income and expenditure such that specific needs of women, men, girls and boys are met equally.
Mrs Juliana Azumah-Mensah, Minister of Women and Children’s Affairs in a speech read on her behalf, noted that understanding gender and appreciating its importance was crucial for accelerating Ghana’s development.
Gender mainstreaming is the incorporation of gender analysis and perspective at all levels of policy making such that it promotes gender equality at all levels.
Mrs Azumah-Mensah said preparing sector budgets in a gender responsive could reduce poverty, pointing out that “Women’s active participation in development makes smart economics and their role in development is seen as critical to the success of any development programme of strategy since women constitute more than half of the world’s population.”
She stressed the challenges the Sector Ministry faced in an effort to mainstream gender into policies and programmes, especially in the allocation of resources to address gender inequality concerns in the society, explaining that the Ministry had over the years received less than one per cent of the total national budget.
Ms Afua Ansre, an official of UN Women, the organisation supporting the Sector Ministry as well as the Ministry of Finance in Gender Responsive Budgeting issues, explained that Parliamentarians were critical partners in terms of rolling out policies, plans and programmes on GRB hence the need to raise awareness among Parliamentarians.
She said the organisation hoped to assist Parliament integrate gender responsive budget processes within their on-going work as well as monitoring and institutional processes.
Ms Ansre expressed the hope that at the end of the workshop Parliamentarians would have deepened their knowledge on gender issues and facilitate the gender mainstreaming and GRB in their policies and programmes.
GNA