To celebrate its tenth anniversary, the Center of Excellence for Gender Responsive Budgeting (CE-BSG), which was created and housed within the Moroccan Ministry of Economy and Finance and supported by the United Nations (UN) Women hosted a two-day hybrid conference on 7 and 8 June 2023 on Gender Responsive Budgeting: Public Finance as a Driver of Change for Equality.
On 8 June, CABRI’s Executive Secretary Dr. Kay Brown was invited to join a technical panel on Gender and Climate Budgeting to speak on methodology and synergy challenges when implementing GRB in climate change, drawing on CABRI’s work on climate change financing.
The panel comprised public financial management (PFM) specialists and heads of budgets from organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the French Development Agency, the World Bank, CE-BSG, and country representatives from Egypt and Palestine. The panel addressed the importance of heightening decision-makers awareness of the challenges of mainstreaming gender in the budgetary decision process.
The aim of the conference was to deepen engagements on public finance as a driver of change for gender equality and to take stock of the advances of Morocco’s Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) model, which is recognized as a best practice on GRB on the international scene.
GRB aims to systematically integrate gender equality goals into public policy planning, budgeting, monitoring, evaluation, and audit. It seeks to highlight the distributive effects of budgets on men and women while adjusting and reallocating public resources to benefit both genders equally, thus, contributing to the reduction of gender inequalities.
The event was an opportunity for high-level discussions on the financing of gender equality as well as the importance of involving all governmental, parliamentarian, and civil society stakeholders in accelerating GRB.
Participants included GRB and public finance practitioners from ministries of finance and line ministries, as well as representatives of local authorities, international organisations and financial institutions, and civil society organisations from several countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and the continent.