The Allocation of Gender-Responsive Budget with Local Governance in Nepal

Abstract

The Gender responsive budgeting (GRB) aims at raising awareness of the gendered impacts of local development budget and to make governments accountable for ensuring gender equality and women’s rights. Government of Nepal introduced a gender budgeting system in 2007/08 for direct, indirect and neutral benefits to women. The Nepalese government had not been allowcating the budget on gender development sectors in local level. In 2015, Nepalese government first time ratified in consitution to allocate the budget on gender development through the local levels. The local government is included the gender development in local policies and programes. In this paper focused on the how many ammount allocated and which sectors mosly allocated of the local elected governments. This paper to explore the gender response budget in local level government and examines the gender development issues at the local level. The descriptive and analytical technique are used to explain the gender sensitivity of policies, planning and programming and budgeting process of the selected two districts in five different local government in Nepal. The results clearly show that merely preparing GRB and strategies does not solve the problem of inequality. Therefore, translating gender mainstreaming into actual action requires a re-examination of the policies, programs and planning/budgeting process from the gender perspectives. Due to the lack of gender needs before planning and allocating gender budgets, the implementation of the GRB program is fully depends on the service provider’s strength, interest in skill development, and capacity building to implement the gender development programs.