A few days back, I attended a program called Policy Breakfast organised by the National Democratic Institute (NDI) Dhaka office where I had to take part in a debate on whether or not the gender budget is empowering women in Bangladesh.
While preparing myself for that event, I cast a renewed look on the impact of having had a gender budget in Bangladesh for the last six years. Exploring various documents and data, it became clear to me that a gender budget by itself cannot ensure the empowerment of women in Bangladesh.
The gender budget was first announced by the finance minister during the budget speech of financial year 2009-10. At the time, it covered only for four ministries. The gender budget report for the coming year, 2015-16, covers 39 ministries and two government divisions. The reason behind this announcement of the gender budget was to identify the level of gender-responsiveness of the national budget.
It is again important to have a gender responsive budget to utilise resources to reduce the gender gap in various sectors including education, health, nutrition, participation in labour force, wage, inheritance rights etc. Thus, it is envisaged that identification of gender sensitivity of various government projects and program activities would help to channel resources and to meet vital gender needs.
Therefore, it is expected that the gender budget will not only identify gender responsiveness of resources in the true sense but also detect the problems of achieving the goal of eradicating gender gap and taking the initiative to reallocate resources according to the findings. In this process, it is expected that there will be no gender gap in opportunities and output, which will go a long way to empower women socially and economically. As a result, the country will also benefit from utilising the female population in a more productive way.
It needs to be mentioned here that the gender budget is not actually a separate allocation, it is just a separate analysis and calculation of part of the national budget from the viewpoint of gender sensitivity of, or gender coverage of, various development and non-development activities of the government. So it is only a tool to understand and raise awareness regarding the gender responsive policies and programs, many of which are necessary for the empowerment of women.
However, just separately reporting allocation of resources on the basis of gender can hardly address the root elements of empowering women in Bangladesh. What is needed is focused policies and programs for women and their implementation with good governance.
The most important route to making women empowered is their economic empowerment. In Bangladesh, women largely remain outside the labour force, though women’s participation in direct economic activities has gradually increased over the last decade. The Labour Force Survey (LFS) data reveals a number of gender discrepancies.
The size of the female labour force has more than doubled from 1999-2000 to 2010, from 8.6 million to 17.2 million, respectively. In spite of the increase in the labour force, with the participation rate of women increasing from 23.9% in 1999-2000 to 36% in 2010, the relative rate remains quite low.
Only about 36% of women (of 15 years and above) participate in the labour force compared to about 82.5% of men. The unemployment rate among women is much higher than that of men: 5.8% compared to 4.1%. Moreover, women are mostly engaged in unpaid family work. Among 11.8 million unpaid family workers, 9.1 million are women. Therefore, we need more investment in education, training, and health of women, so that their participation in remunerative employment increases.
Many elements which are the main obstacles for women empowerment in Bangladesh are rooted in the mindset of people towards gender roles and a lack of awareness. Even at the presence of resources and policies, women may remain reluctant towards economic or political empowerment, if the mindsets of both men and women remain unchanged.
Under the refinancing scheme of the Bangladesh Bank, credit for small and medium-sized entrepreneurs is available at a lower interest rate, and 15% of the credit is supposed to be sanctioned to women for the participating commercial banks to get concessional interest rates.
It is interesting to note that even after this opportunity, the banks often fail to fulfill the target of 15% female borrowers. The root cause behind this is the mindset. Many women consider business to be a difficult job -- they lack training, they have limited access to information, and also they do not have a supporting family environment. Until these deficiencies are addressed with proper programs, a separate gender budget report will be meaningless.
The current process of developing a gender budget has a number of shortcomings. It is not transparent how the gender impact of various budget allocations is calculated. In most cases, 50% of the beneficiaries of a program are claimed to be female. But in most of the cases, it appears to be calculated on an ad hoc basis.
Without changing the current administrative structure and process of developing the gender budget, we cannot expect much from it. Moreover, till date, there is no monitoring of the gender budget to investigate whether or not various programs mentioned in it were successful in achieving any sort of impact.
Thus, what we need are gender-sensitive policies and programs, and proper implementation. The gender budget is necessary but not sufficient for women empowerment.
