20 April, 2007 

Islamabad: Speakers at a workshop here on Thursday called for joint efforts to introduce the conceptual framework and methodology for formulating a Gender Budget Statement (GBS). The one-day workshop, titled Gender Responsive Budgeting Initiative (GRBI), was facilitated by South African researcher Debbie Budlender, while the Finance Ministry’s Additional Secretary Ahmed Jawad was chief guest on the occasion.

Government officials, gender and social sector specialists, and representatives of non-governmental organisations, international donor agencies and research institutes attended the workshop. Jawad briefed participants about the level of gender inequality in Pakistan, and said the government was working at various levels to reduce gender gaps, adding that gender responsive budgeting was one of the tools for achieving this goal within the overall framework of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP).

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26 April 2007 

The experience of Morocco in using GRB to achieve gender equality was presented at a workshop on the theme “Development Effectiveness in practice: applying the Paris Declaration to advancing Gender Equality, Environmental Sustainability and Human Rights”. The meeting convened in Dublin by Irish Aid, OECD and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark from 26-27 April 2007 is one of the key events on the FFD agenda.

28 February 2007 

In prelude to the 2008 Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) on Financing for Gender Equality, the Bureau of the CSW convened on February 28, 2007 at the UN Secretariat in New York an informal experts’ panel on “Financing for gender equality and the empowerment of women”.

The panel was organized to review existing mechanisms and processes for financing gender equality and the empowerment of women at the national, regional and global levels, identify good practices and lessons learned, and highlight gaps and challenges requiring further attention.

4 March 2007 

As part of the preparations for International Women’s Day, the Afghan Ministry of Finance announced on March 4th 2007 the opening of its first Gender Budgeting Unit. The purpose of the Gender Budgeting Unit supported by GTZ is to ensure that the budget process is just and fair, and that resources are equally distributed to all citizens.

22 January 2007 

Archbishop Desmond Tutu and fellow Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai have said that African governments have failed to deliver on a 2001 health pledge - costing millions of lives. For the two leaders, a number of governments promised to spend 15 per cent of their budgets on helping people who were diseased or sick but that few had kept to their words.

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