Talk is cheap, but carrying out the promises you make less so. That being the case, has all the talk about ensuring equality between men and women in South Africa resulted in action where it counts most: the allocation of funds along gender lines in the national budget?
Nearly a decade ago, the Ministry of Finance promised to provide a breakdown of ways in which the budget promoted gender equality. It still hasn’t happened, but finance ministry spokesperson Thoraya Pandy was unable to comment on the reasons for this.
“There’s a wall of silence on this issue,” says Penny Parenzee of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, a Pretoria-based think-tank, noting that this may — at least in part — result from fears that men will lose out in a budget which makes a nod to women’s needs.
“One of the biggest challenges when you talk gender is that people get their backs up … They get very concerned about what this means for men,” says Parenzee, who has two years of research behind her on how the budget takes account of gender. “When you talk budgets, it’s also bad. If you combine the two issues, it is very difficult.”
Progress on the matter also seemed to slow significantly after legislators for the ruling African National Congress who had played a key role in highlighting gender issues, such as activist Pregs Govender, opted for life outside the government fishbowl.
Just a handful of people in South Africa are working on matters related to gender budgeting at present, some of whom also have numerous other demands on their time.
This may be a reflection of a wider skills shortage in government. The dearth of number-crunchers in South Africa is acute — a legacy of the country’s apartheid past, when little investment was made in giving a proper education to the black majority.
In this context, Parenzee says many otherwise sympathetic officials see making allowance for gender in the budget as “more work”.
A situation may also have been created where budgetary analysis of gender issues is not only limited, but also superficial. “My own take is that a lot of our work has been descriptive: what is in the budget, what isn’t. It hasn’t been an in-depth analysis,” says Parenzee.
But, disaggregated data — information which shows what amount of money spent on social initiatives actually reaches women — is, as Parenzee says, “critical”.
“How do you measure government’s commitment to gender equality if you don’t know where the money’s going?” she asks.
Happily, there is progress in certain quarters, notably the legislature of the small but powerful province of Gauteng. This region is the biggest single source of gross domestic product in sub-Saharan Africa.
Several departments of Gauteng’s provincial legislature now provide disaggregated data in their budgets, while others have asked for help in ensuring that their own figures are gender specific.
For its part, the Gender Advocacy Programme, an independent lobby group based in the coastal city of Cape Town, is focusing on how local government can provide information for determining the extent to which government funds benefit both women and men.
Also in Cape Town, seven community organisations which deal with violence against women in the massive low-income and squatter settlement of Khayelitsha have been asking local clinics, courts and police offices for copies of their budgets. The groups want to do a gender analysis of how these departments are spending their money.
To date, activists have come away empty-handed — but undeterred. Now the community groups plan to speak to their local councillors, to find out why they were refused permission to examine the budgets.
Plans are also afoot to speak to parliamentarians about making the budget sensitive to gender concerns.
National government has come in for praise recently for increasing social grants such as child support, pensions and disability allowances.
Allowing poor children up to the age of 14 to receive benefits has obvious benefits for women, who are the primary caregivers and make up the bulk of the poverty-stricken population.
But, activists caution that these developments — while welcome — should not be seen as a substitute for analyzing the budget’s broader treatment of women.
The increased social grants were “focused on welfare, not on gender,” says Parenzee. “It was more by chance that it ended up with a gender component.” — IPS