Gender-Responsive Budgeting: Tracking Budgets on Women Economic Empowerment Initiatives (WEEI) in Kenya.

Adequately-funded programs targeting women’s economic empowerment initiatives are essential in the realization of women’s control over resources, increasing their income levels as well as enhancing their decision-making within households and in public spaces. The Kenya national government funding model through its state departments shows that comprehensive application of Gender-Responsive Budgeting (GRB) would provide an opportunity for the government to directly link the budgetary allocations to gender priorities and commitments. Adopting the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), governments committed to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. This report seeks to establish the progress Kenya has made towards these commitments by analyzing national budget allocations to Women’s Economic Empowerment Initiatives (WEEI) and by looking at how the budgets are spent at the national level. Since the budget is the most important economic and policy instrument used by governments to translate polices and commitments into service delivery. This study also seeks to establish whether the overall government spending and the initiatives by the state departments translate into improved women’s economic empowerment initiatives in Kenya.

Findings from the national budget analysis:

1. The Kenya National Census conducted in 2019 puts the percentage population of women at 50.5% of the entire population. The entire budget with WEE-friendly initiatives on average is 23% of the national budget in the financial year 2021/22, and 25% for financial year 2022/23. This is an indicator of the inadequate attention accorded to women’s empowerment matters albeit some state department dedicated towards WEEI, e.g. the National Gender and Equality Commission, Department for Social Protection, and State Department for Gender.
2. The Budgetary allocation for National level on WEE is concentrated on 11 state departments. The State Department for Gender and the National Gender and Equality Commission allocated 100% of their total budget to Women’s Economic Empowerment Initiatives (WEEI) over the two fiscal years under analysis. While WEEI-sensitive programs were discernible in all the eleven state departments, isolating expenditure on women’s initiatives across departments proved challenging due to the highly aggregated nature of most figures on budgetary allocations.
3. Allocation of budgets for women’s economic empowerment represents a crucial initial phase in the effective implementation of these financial resources. A comprehensive and well-executed implementation strategy is essential for unlocking the full potential of these budgets and fostering positive and lasting change for women in the economic domain. Monitoring spending through absorption rates serves as a metric for implementation progress.
4. Both national and county governments have demonstrated some efforts toward allocating resources to specific actions, interventions, or programs with a direct impact on addressing gender inequality. However, a notable gap exists in the evidence to indicate whether, during the budgeting processes, practitioners systematically assess how each allocation affects women, men, girls, and boys, respectively. The current approach to budget reporting, coupled with the lack of disaggregation in reporting on budget allocations and executions, poses a challenge in tracing financing directed towards priority policy areas on Women’s Economic Empowerment Initiatives (WEEI) in state departments such as land, housing, environment, and agriculture.

Key policy messages specific to WEEI budget:

1. Establishment of a gender management database to be updated regularly and should include disaggregated data on women’s initiatives as a minimum standard. There should be a deliberate move to strengthen the capacity, to develop and use the national guidelines on collection, collation and analysis of sex disaggregated to inform women’s empowerment policies.
2. The existing legal and institutional framework is sufficient to promote gender responsive budgeting. However, there are implementation gaps across the budget cycle which need to be addressed.
3. The national governments should increase resources to WEE issues and in turn improve the welfare of women through increased income levels, giving them more entrepreneurial skills, and further enhance women’s decision-making and control over resources.

Recommendations on enhancing budget allocation transparency:

1. The national government should improve details of budget information by not only providing disaggregated information on government programmes on women’s economic initiatives but also explicitly developing gender-related budget codes (to appear in the national budget allocations) to facilitate budget analysis and tracking.
2. Periodically publish state departments and counties with WEE-related budget allocations that surpass the agreed-upon or planned minimum spending levels in absolute or relative terms.

Read complete Report: GENDER RESPONSIVE BUDGETING REPORT IEA