12. Gender Responsive Budgeting as an Instrument for Gender Mainstreaming in Bangladesh: Gaps and Challenges
Synopsis
Discrimination between men and women prevails in many countries thus creating roadblocks to equitable access to education, health, leadership, employment, and so on. Society progress is regressed when equal rights and opportunities are not accrued by every section of society. As such gender has been conceptualised and essentialised as preeminent pathways of development and progression of society. A gender budget does not certainly infer an independent budget for women. Gender budget is about seeing the budget from a ‘gender lens’, not from a ‘feminist lens’. A gender lens focuses on both men and women alike whereas, a feminist lens believes that patriarchal ideals shape public spending, thus women and girls are treated as subordinate to men and boys (Hosein, Basdeo-Gobin & Geny,2020). From a gender lens, gender-responsive budgeting is basically an analytical tool to scrutinise the impact of government budgeting in reducing gender discrimination and making affirmative actions to reduce gender inequality by improving allocations at the national and field level (Panda, 2022). In Bangladesh, gender equality has become a glaring affair in the fiscal policy of the government to translate gender-neutral public financing into reality. Gender budgeting is an instrument of the government to ameliorate discrimination and to guarantee gender-sensitive public financial management practices by bridging and institutionalising gender in the mainstream of the budgetary process. It is among a few strategies to address gender incongruities in budget and resource allocations. Besides, it guarantees accountability and transparency of government initiatives.