Colleen Lowe Morna South AfricaOs WomenOs Budget Initiative (WBI) is receiving more accolades abroad than commitment at home. Launched in government three years ago as part of a high-profile, two-year pilot project on gender and economic policy supported by the Commonwealth secretariat, the gender implications of public expenditure received extensive commentary in the 1998 and 1999 budgets. But with the project over, the 2000 budget fell conspicuously silent on gender issues. Ironically, gender budget initiatives are mushrooming around the globe from St Kitts Nevis and Barbados in the Caribbean to India, Sri Lanka and Philippines in Asia; and in numerous African countries many of these drawing their inspiration from South Africa.
Speaking at a recent international review of gender budget initiatives in London, the editor of the NGO component of the initiative, Debbie Budlender, attributed the growing inertia in the Department of Finance to the departure of former deputy minister Gill Marcus and of other key proponents.
She says an encouraging sign is that Gauteng and the Western Cape have launched gender budget initiatives at provincial level; and there is a growing interest in the concept among local governments. A simplified version of the research, Money Matters, accompanied by numerous training workshops, has raised public awareness of the gender dimensions of public expenditure. But there is concern that without the necessary drive from the top an initiative that is being touted abroad as one of the most powerful tools for women to lobby for equality of outcomes as opposed to simply equality of opportunity will fall on the rocks. Unlike its Australian prototype, which was entirely government driven and has been scrapped since the advent of the conservative government in 1996, the South African WBI began as a joint initiative of the committee on the quality of life and status of women in Parliament and the Institute for Democracy in South Africa. Each year, for the past four years, the WBI has undertaken research on the gender implications of spending by different sectors, departments and most recently a sampling of local government. Getting the Department of Finance to participate in the high-profile Commonwealth project provided a welcome entry point into the executive. In 1997 Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel reported to the committee that defence spending had dropped from 9,1% to 5,7% of the budget, with these resources being shifted to the social sectors critical for womenOs empowerment. Detailed analyses of the implications of various allocations for womenOs equality accompanied the budget in the succeeding two years. But to date the WBI has thrown up more interesting data than action. For example, the first WBI study showed that less than 2% of the education budget goes towards literacy (70% of those who are illiterate in South Africa are women) and an even lower percentage to educare (the absence of state-funded child care is a serious impediment to womenOs participation in the workforce). While there are roughly equal numbers of girls and boys at school, girl dropout rates are much higher due to financial constraints and teenage pregnancies.
Even where men and women receive equal years of schooling, women earn less, often because they go into the Osoft professionsO while men are concentrated in the higher- paying technical and financial fields. Yet debates on education have hardly begun to address these multiple gender dimensions that lead to the gap between de jure and de facto equality. One advantage of the South African WBI compared to other countries is its multi- prong bases in Parliament, the government and civil society. But a more focused lobbying strategy is essential if the mounds of revealing research are to be translated into meaningful policy changes. Colleen Lowe Morna is director of Gender Links Associates, a gender, media and development research and training organisation