Company Profile

Company Description:

Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) seeks to mainstream gender issues into the national budgeting processes from planning to implementation, monitoring and evaluation. In recent years, GRB has been increasingly used in various countries as an effective tool to channel financial resources and monitor progress towards achieving gender targets and priorities. Over the past eight years, UN Women has supported GRB work in more than 30 countries at national, sectoral and local levels and significantly contributed to positioning GRB within the framework of mainstream fiscal policy as well as national planning and budgeting processes.

Work on GRB in Ethiopia provides a platform for gender mainstreaming that will strengthen policies and budgets across sectors to better meet the needs of women and men in local communities. The Ministry of Finance and Economic Development (MOFED) has a lead role in the institutionalization of GRB: A gender responsive Budget Call for the 2010 fiscal year (2003 Ethiopian fiscal year) requests Sectoral Ministries to include activities in support of the implementation of the Women’s Policy and gender inclusive policies in the budgets submitted to MOFED as part of the annual national budgeting process.

In the context of its Country Programme Strategy for Ethiopia (2008-2011), UN Women has developed a partnership with MOFED focusing on capacity building of government officials on GRB tools as well as the development of guidelines for institutionalizing GRB in selected sectoral budgets. UN Women is also working closely with MOWCYA in the context of the UN Flagship Joint Programme on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in support of the implementation of specific thematic priorities on women’s economic empowerment, preventing and responding to Gender Based Violence as well as institutional capacity strengthening across sectors. Furthermore, UN Women’s partnership with the Ministry for Women, Children and Youth Affairs focuses on the development and use of a leveling tool to assess results of gender mainstreaming across different sectors.

UN Women has also developed partnerships with civil society organizations in Ethiopia that implement projects aiming at strengthening the gender dimensions of selected regional development plans and budgets.