Decentralization has sometimes been presented as a magic bullet for both development and democracy. Since nearly everyone, from world leaders to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to donors, agrees that development and democracy both fail unless women are included on an equal footing with men, successful decentralization should make government more accessible, accountable, and responsive to women.But does it?

The publication produced by AWID provides the latest analysis on the funding trends impacting women’s rights organizing and the financial status of women’s organizations around the world. Based on a survey of over 1,100 women’s organizations in every region of the world, the report helps make sense of the rapidly changing funding landscape and makes recommendations for how to mobilize more and better resources for women’s rights organizing through a feminist collective resource mobilization approach.

This report presents research on the costs of implementing South Africa's Domestic Violence Act (DVA), with a focus on quantifying missing personnel costs. It describes the methodology used in the research, the process required to obtain a protection order and the time taken at each step. The authors discuss factors impeding the execution of the DVA, such as the role of criminal justice employees. They also offer recommendations to secure an adequate budget to implement the DVA.

This report focuses on the responses of international aid agencies working on violence against women (VAW) in Central America and, in particular, the situation in Honduras. One of the conclusions of the publication is that International organisations should commit to gender budgeting, which is important as an indicator and create mechanisms to monitor their own organisations performance on VAW.

This report presents the results of a research aimed at developing a diagnosis and an analysis of the opportunities that stem from introducing a gender approach in budgetary processes in some communes of Morocco. It was prepared under a joint UNIFEM/EU initiative supporting the integration of a gender approach in the systems and budgetary processes at local level in the context of decentralization. The report is in French.

Since 2004, 13 research projects supported in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America by the Women's Rights and Citizenship program of Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) have been exploring exactly how decentralization affects women's access to services, resources, and local power. The findings show that these reforms do not automatically benefit women, and can even put them at a disadvantage.

The main research question of this study To what extent do post-conflict reconstruction initiatives allocate resources to promote gender equality, address women's needs and involve women in decision-making around strategies and related resource allocations? In the Post-Conflict Needs Assessments examined in this paper, less than 5 percent of activities and only 3 percent of budget lines mentioned women's needs. Low and diminishing levels of gender-responsiveness were also evident in PRSPs.

This report by Nalini Burn, Larabi Jaidi and Hayat Zirari (2005) is a diagnostic study designed to analyse the potential of gender mainstreaming in the budget process of Morocco's communes. This study, which is part of a an international initiative supported by UNIFEM and the European Union, is concerned with gender mainstreaming in budget systems and practices at local level and within a context of decentralisation.

This report synthesises findings from a two year research and advocacy programme "Just Budgets" carried out in partnership with four leading African civil society organisations. The aim of the programme was to explore how gender responsive budgeting (GRB) could be applied to new aid modalities (budget and sector support) in order to strengthen gender equality outcomes in development cooperation. The research was a response to aid financing reforms articulated in the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness.

This report presents the findings of a country review carried out in Uganda by Nite Tanzarn under the programme"Integrating gender responsive budgeting into the aid effectiveness agenda" launched by UNIFEM and the European Commission (EC) in 2008. The report describes how gender responsive budgeting (GRB) work has engaged with the key aid effectiveness instruments in Uganda over the past five years.