A medium-sized body of rigorous literature provides guidance on how to integrate gender into PFM systems successfully.
- Guidance on effective approaches:
– Overall requirements are: securing the known enabling factors (such as sustained political support, sufficient capacities and conducive institutional arrangements); adapting to context; involving a range of stakeholders at all stages; and generating sex-disaggregated data.
– Considering the three phases of GRB (awareness, accountability, change), it has proven hardest to move from analysis to a change in budgets. Ways to make progress include impact evaluations of GRB, country-specific methodologies, the mainstreaming of gender into participatory budgeting initiatives, and gender-sensitive participatory research.
– The budget process can be made gender-responsive: Sharp (2003) offers approaches tailored to the stages of budget preparation, approval, execution, and audit and evaluation.
– A gender-specific breakdown of expenditures looks at women-specific targeted expenditures, expenditures on equal employment, and most importantly mainstream expenditures. - Specific tools have been developed, largely based on work by Budlender, Sharp and Elson:
– On revenues, gender-disaggregated analyses are effective tools to work on tax incidence (direct and indirect taxes), user fees, and government debt.
– On expenditures, effective tools for gender-aware work are available for policy appraisal, beneficiary assessment, incidence analysis of public expenditure, analysis of the impact of budgets on time use, budget statements, and medium-term frameworks of economic policy. - External actors such as donors can integrate gender effectively into their work, through entry points based on aid principles (alignment, mutual accountability, results-oriented management), in PFM and in budget support (both general and sectoral).
