Practical Guidance to Integrate Gender into Public Financial Management

Question: What practical guidance is available on integrating gender into public financial management systems in developing countries? What is the evidence on what has worked and what has not worked? If possible, provide specific guidance on the different parts of PFM systems. Helpdesk response Key findings: 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).