Budget Support: As good as the strategy it finances

This article by Rebecca Carter, Stephen Lister looks at the relevance of budget support to financing the relevant MDGs, and draws some conclusions about the role of budget support, how it should be designed and the attitude civil society organizations should adopt towards it.

Bridging the Gap: Financing Gender Equality

This publication intended for those who wish to better understand the links between gender equality, public policy formation and development financing. It highlights the importance of expanding policy choices in setting the framework for national development plans, and emphasizes the central role of strategies to advance gender equality and the empowerment of women in achieving development effectiveness. The publication is also available in French and Spanish.

Bridging the Gap between Gender Analysis and Gender Responsive Budgets (Marshall sland)

This paper examines a GRB pilot project undertaken in the small Pacific country of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). This pilot project was conducted over a one-year budget cycle (September 2002-September 2003), and formed part of a regional technical assistance project funded by the Asian Development Bank. The technical assistance was provided by a University of South Australia (UniSA) consultancy team, comprising four advisors with expertise in gender, economics, policy and budgeting.

AWID Primer: CSO's Engagement in the Aid Effectiveness Agenda

This third primer in the AWID Aid Effectiveness and Women's Rights series focuses on describing how the parallel tracking process is being undertaken independently by CSOs and, most recently, some women's rights organizations. This primer seeks first to provide a background and overview of this parallel process, then identifies some pressing concerns, and lastly presents some recommendations from the civil society perspective.

An Investment that Pays off: Promoting Gender Equality as a Means to Finance Development

This paper identifies the linkages between gender equality and financing for development, with an eye to connecting these results to concrete policy implications that can be adopted by developing countries to ensure a win-win outcome: greater gender equality, resource mobilization, and improvements in societal well-being. Under the conditions of financial resource constraints, especially, investing in the improvement of gender equality in a country can stimulate economic growth for the whole society.

A Gender Analysis of the Impact of Indirect Taxes on Small and Medium Enterprises in Vietnam

This paper on SMEs in Vietnam, looks into biases that help explain the higher costs and lower profits of female-owned enterprises.  It brings together gender analysis, small scale enterprise analysis, and gender budget analysis in a development context by demonstrating that gender matters not only to the ownership of an SME, but also to its most likely principal activity, the stock of the assets that it possesses, the labour that it utilizes, the costs that it faces, the revenues that it generates, and the profits that it earns.  The paper's main thrust lies in its argument

Advancing the process of gender budgeting in the Pacific

This paper attempts to briefly examine the level of readiness/preparedness of Pacific Island countries (PICs) to advance the process of incorporating gender-responsive budget initiatives into national policies and public expenditure management systems. The paper touches on the "how to" mechanisms for progress based on the recommendations of the Ninth Triennial Conference of Pacific Women in 2004.

A Commonwealth Initiative to Integrate Gender into National Budgetary Processes

This paper by the Commonwealth Secretariat (1999) provides a rationale for the strategic goals of the Commonwealth Gender Budget Initiative at the national level and highlights the need for integrating a gender perspective in macroeconomic policies and budgets. In addition, the paper outlines the necessary tools required for a gender analysis of the budget and the results from pilot initiatives in Sri Lanka and South Africa.

Gender Responsive Budgeting in FYR Macedonia

This fact sheet was produced by UNIFEM in 2007 under the UNIFEM sub -regional programme "Gender-Responsive Budgeting in South East Europe: Advancing Gender Equality and Democratic Governance through Increased Transparency and Accountability launched in late 2006. The programme includes Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Serbia. In the Former Yugoslav Republic (FYR) of Macedonia, UNIFEM carried out a needs assessment of the budgetary processes and public finance reforms in October 2006.