House Budget Committee Urged to address Gender Gaps Draft Special Budget FY 2021

The concern for gender equity and elimination of “Discrimination” against women has been at the center of advocacy over the decades.

Culturally entrenched attitudes and behaviors have been flagged out by advocacy groups with a call for an end to these activities affecting women.

The UN Women, an international women organization financing advocacies for women in Liberia and the world at large, is mindful of this situation and has made it her mandate to shift the narrative by constantly engaging and supporting the Legislature through the budgeting process to use evidence-based analysis as a way of supporting the Budget Committee to take steps in ensuring budgetary allocations that will address the gender gaps and ultimate issues about violence against girls, women.

Recently, with support from the EU UN Spotlight Initiative Program, members of the National Budget Committee participated in a presentation on gender analysis of 4 sectors (health, education, gender and youth and sports) with the aim of enhancing the capacity of the Budget Committee on gender-responsive planning and budgeting in order to ensure that resources are allocated for women economic empowerment and to address violence against women/harmful practices (VAGW/HP) and gender equality issues within the national budget. 

Attended by 18 Budget Committee members including the committee on Gender, the conference generated robust discussions with firm commitments on the part of the lawmakers. At the presentation, one key finding was that none of the four institutions, (Ministries of Health, Education, Gender, Children and Social Protection and Ministry of Youth and Sports) had allocations to address specific gender inequality issues.

 It also flagged out that the current method of line-item budgeting made it difficult to determine which budget lines support gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) implementation, while at the same time noting that there was no disaggregated data in the budget plan. 

Importantly, the personnel expenditures accounted for 83% of total budgetary allocations for the four sectors combined, while non-personnel expenditures including goods and services, and capital and transfers accounted for 17%. 

This is an indication of limited or zero funding to address gender equality issues.

What stood out prominent was  the current budget that clearly undermines the Government of Liberia National Gender Policy in which the government committed to breaking away from its past and assured citizens of demonstrating high political will and commitment to eliminate all forms of gender based discrimination in order to achieve gender equality.

The participants, therefore,  recommended the need for  UN Women to engage the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning from the early stages of the budget preparation to make sure some of these concerns are addressed before the submission of the executive draft budget proposal to the Legislature.