Technical Brief - GRB in the context of COVID-19

Description:

This technical brief builds on UN Women’s Guidance Note on ‘Assessing Fiscal Stimulus Packages to respond to the Socio-Economic Impacts of Covid-19’ and it presents key entry points for using gender responsive budgeting to assess and monitor COVID-19 fiscal support packages. It presents five main GRB tools with corresponding information and guiding questions to support their use in the current context. These tools are:

• Ex-ante gender impact assessment to analyze expected gender impacts of the package;
• Publicly available gender budget statement in which the government sets out how it expects the package to support women and promote gender equality;
• Mechanism for Parliamentary scrutiny in scrutinizing the package through parliamentary questions and committee hearings;
• Real time expenditure tracking system to monitor disbursements of the package and to issue reports on how far this is reaching women and supporting gender equality; and
• Gender audit of the expenditures by the state auditing institution, including an assessment of the gender equality impact of the expenditures actually disbursed; and a social audit by civil society organizations to monitor service delivery on the ground and how well it is responding.