News & Events

  • In 2011, Equal in Rights published “A Guide to Costing Human Rights” by Victor Steenbergen. This paper provides an overview of all the central concepts and definitions relevant for costing human rights policy.
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  • In 2011, Equal in Rights published “ Frontloading Human Rights: A Conceptual Framework for Building Budget and Realising rights” by Victor Steenbergen. This paper defines all the key concepts and provides an understanding of their relevance for Frontloading Human Rights.
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  • The International Human Rights Internship Program (IHRIP), in collaboration with the International Budget Partnership (IBP), implemented a ten-day West African Regional Learning Program on Human Rights Budget Work in Monrovia, Liberia from July 4th to July 13th, 2011.
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  • The Center for Women’s Global Leadership published its report on“Maximum Available Resources and Human Rights” in June 2011. This report examines a number of ways that governments can access financial resources in order to fulfill their obligation to use “maximum available resources” to realize ESC rights.
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  • “ No Protection for Children in the Budget 2011-2012” provides an analysis from a child rights’ perspective of the allocations for children (Budget for Children—BfC) in the 2011-12 Indian Union budget. 
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  • In December 2010, The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights in an article, "Austerity Budgets Will Cause Further Child Poverty", recently said that political priorities and budget allocations are the principal reasons for the large differences in child poverty rates among European countries, and between those countries in similar economic situations. 
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  • In mid-2009 the International Budget Partnership (IBP) released “It’s Our Money. Where’s It Gone?”, a documentary film on the work of one of its partners, MUHURI (Muslims for Human Rights).  MUHURI involves communities directly in monitoring expenditure of the government’s Constituency Development Fund (CDF) in Mombasa, Kenya.“
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  • In early 2010 IHRIP and the International Budget Partnership (IBP) produced “Reading the books: Government budgets and the right to education” that looks at elements of the right to education and where these might be found in a government’s budget; a government’s human rights obligations and questions these raise about a government’s budget; a process for using a rights framework to analyze a government’s education budget; and a short discussion of costing related to the right to education.
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Gender budgets PDF Print E-mail

 

Gender budget work is generally motivated by a concern about inequities and discrimination in government budget allocations and expenditures that are detrimental to women. This type of gender budget work has as its ultimate aim (whether this is stated explicitly or not) ensuring that women’s human rights are respected and realized.  A significant number of groups around the world are involved in gender budgeting, and an essential source of information about the work is a web site hosted by UNIFEM.

Not so common in gender budgeting is work that applies national and international human rights standards to specific sectoral budgets (see Government budgets related to specific rights within this site), and then, taking those findings, undertakes additional analysis to assess gender equality and non-discrimination, as envisioned in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forums of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). An example would be an analysis of an education budget to identify what the government, through the budget, is doing to ensure that all students have physical accessibility to education. The additional analysis would be whether government’s expenditures to ensure physical accessibility are made on a non-discriminatory basis, to ensure that girls and boys have equal access.

The UNIFEM website provides links to a wide range of materials on gender budget workbudgeting4womensrights210x280

Two publications are particularly interesting, in that they make explicit links between budget work that focuses on specific rights and gender budgeting concerns. They are:

  • Budgeting for Women’s Rights: Monitoring Government Budgets for Compliance with CEDAW, authored by Diane Elson and published by UNIFEM in 2006. The book combines substantive analysis with country examples, and discusses how budgets and budget policy-making processes can be monitored for compliance with human rights standards, in particular with provisions in CEDAW.

  • Idasa’s Budget Brief 111 , which looks at the famous Grootboom case in South Africa, analyzing the context and facts of the case, as well as the relevant housing policies and budgets, from the perspective of women’s right to housing.