I'm going to talk this evening as both a South African and someone who has assisted over 20 countries, as well as international agencies, with gender-responsive budgeting. Some of what I say will be about South Africa, and some will be what I think I've learned from working in other countries, mainly developing countries like Africa and Asia, but also some other parts of the world.
I have seen the notes from some previous sessions, so I will try to respond to some of the issues that have been raised and not duplicate too much what you've heard already.
I was responsible for helping the Commonwealth Secretariat pull together the responses to a questionnaire that went out to all the finance ministries of Commonwealth countries in preparation for the finance ministers meeting. This was a questionnaire that the finance ministers had decided to send to check what had happened two years after they had all taken a commitment to do gender-responsive budgeting.
There was a response from the Canadian Department of Finance in there, and that response said clearly that the Canadian government felt it was doing gender-responsive budgeting. I think it's important for the committee to know that your government believes it is doing gender-responsive budgeting. It feels it's not something new, so that is something to ask it about. It referred in particular to the gender-based analysis that is done throughout federal departments and agencies, in line with the 1995 federal plan for gender equality.
Several of the developed countries, when we ask about gender budgeting, refer to general gender audits. In my mind, gender budgeting is a specialized form of gender audit that adds an extra budget punch to a gender audit. So gender budgeting for me is almost broader than gender audit, in that it does all the other stages but asks the important question about the money.
The Canadian government response was that where appropriate and where data exists, Department of Finance branches can do GBA when they are developing policies. It didn't really go further to say for which policies it had done this. It also talked about distributional impacts of the policies on Canadians from an income, regional, and gender lens that it does whenever possible or relevant. There are perhaps questions for the committee there about when it thinks it is possible and when it thinks it is relevant, because those qualifying words leave a lot of room for manoeuvring.
It also mentioned the pre-budget consultations as an important input into the analysis to ensure policies don't have unintended consequences on our “segment of the population including women”. So it sees that both its own analyses and what women say are important in forming what policies should be given budgets.
Finally, from what I know about Canada, the Canadian International Development Agency has supported gender-responsive budgeting in several countries. I personally have done work that was funded by CIDA in Malawi, the Philippines, and Bangladesh. Other countries where this has happened are Tanzania, Vietnam, Pakistan, and perhaps others.
So there is a sense that the Canadian government is saying it believes in gender-responsive budgeting. That's my first area.
The second area consists of some international lessons, and some of these echo what you've heard already.
The first is that gender-responsive budgeting is always easier to do when countries are using some form of performance- or results-based budgeting. It's easier to do it with that than with line item budgeting, because the performance- or results-based budgeting looks at physical outputs and outcomes rather than treating budgeting as a bookkeeping exercise, which is what used to happen in the old days. That lesson says Canada is in an excellent position to do gender-responsive budget, because you have your management resources and results structure policy, your reports on plans and priorities, and your department performance reports. Those allow you to ask what you're giving money for and how you measure physically what that money has delivered, which for me is an important part of gender-responsive budgeting.
When we started this exercise, everybody thought only of the money, but the money is a promise, the budget is a promise, and we have to check that this promise gets followed through, and we do that through monitoring. You have the reports to do that monitoring if they're presented in the correct way.
The third area I'd like to go on to is South Africa, because it was mentioned in the previous hearings as a country in the lead, and there have been questions in your previous hearings, I know, about what has happened to South Africa.
We started the work in 1995, soon after the post-apartheid elections, and the work was done by a parliamentary committee, initially the finance committee, together with two NGOs. The idea was that the NGOs would do the research, and the parliamentarians would be able to take the facts and figures and use them to push things further because of their political power.
Over a period of three, four, or five years, we analyzed the budgets of every single department, as well as local governments' donor money into governmental fiscal relations revenues. We were there to prove an ideological point: you could find gender everywhere, not just in health and welfare. But we also felt it wasn't our task to do this on a regular basis. That was the task of governments, because there should be an accountability exercise whereby governments should be reporting to us and to Parliament what they are doing with our money.
For two years or so, the National Treasury did include gender-responsive budgeting in its annual budget report, but by about 1999-2000, they became a little bit more reluctant. I put it down to two reasons. First, it was no longer so easy to blame apartheid for anything that was wrong, because they had been in power for five years or so. And secondly, they were saying they'd get on to gender later; for the moment they'd got important budget reforms like performance budgeting, and they must get the important things right first.
At the national level, nothing consolidated is being done, but two of the provinces have institutionalized gender budgeting. Gauteng Province, which is where Johannesburg is, has being doing it every year since 2002--their report's in the annual budget--and my province of Western Cape, which is around Cape Town, has just started doing a gender- and youth-responsive budget. That'll be reported in the budget that gets published and tabled in February/March next year.
Every department is asked to show the allocations they think contribute the most to gender equality and youth development. It's similar in some ways to the South Australian approach, but the important innovation we've made is that they must include a report on what the subprogram that gets the largest amount of money is doing. We made that instruction so they wouldn't just focus on the crumbs they were giving to youth and gender, but they would tell us where the big money was going.
We have a parliamentary committee on women in the national Parliament that is, I think, similar to your own committee. One interesting development over the last three years is that twice a year that parliamentary committee commissions me and pays me out of their budget to assist them in analyzing the budget and preparing their report on the budget and sharing other skills with them. We have a committee that is probably a lot less formally educated than you are, and this sort of support is necessary because of the intimidation of the larger number of documents related to the budget.
That's really all I'd like to say for a start, except to say that something I've learned in working in many countries is that gender-responsive budgeting is not something that happens overnight. You need to persevere. You need to adapt the approach to suit a particular country's budgeting. There's no single recipe with the approach to budgeting. I think you need to keep it simple and unburdensome if you expect civil servants to continue to do it with some attention. The exception in that respect is France, which I think hasn't been mentioned in your committee. Every year France produces a large report related to gender-responsive budgeting; it is tabled together with their budget.
I'll leave it at that. Thank you.