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Gender-responsive budgeting is a crucial tool for women’s empowerment. In Morocco, UNIFEM has worked with the government to create a more tailored approach in which budgeting can have a more effective and immediate impact. As this documentary illustrates, when the needs of women living in a particular geographical and cultural context are addressed, the entire community benefits. In the past four years, the Finance Ministry of Morocco has made substantial progress in developing both gender-responsive and results-oriented budgetary reform.| Engendering Macroeconomic Policy in Budgets, Unpaid, and Informal Work |
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TITLE: Engendering Macroeconomic Policy in Budgets, Unpaid, and Informal Work http://www.gender-budgets.org/content/view/162/153/ II. Engendering National BudgetsWomen’s alternative budgets are not separate budgets for women. Women’s budgets are based on the argument that the creation of wealth in a country depends on the output of both the market economy and the “household and community care ” economy. Women’s budgets examine the efficiency and equity implications of budget allocations and the policies and programs that lie behind them. So far, Australia, Sweden, Canada, and South Africa have each produced at least one such document, with Australia producing a women's budget every year since 1984. Until recently, most non-governmental initiatives have taken place in the “North.” The success of the recent South African initiative has raised a new interest around the developing world in gender analysis of budgets. It also coincided with the growing awareness on the differential impact of macroeconomic policies on disadvantaged groups in general and on women in particular. The South African Women's Budget Initiative (WBI) is primarily non-governmental, although it receives the support of the Joint Standing Committee on Finance. It is a collaborative effort of the parliamentary Committee on the Quality of Life and Status of Women and two NGOs, IDASA and the Community Agency for Social Enquiry. The government-supported program is formed by an external committee of academics and NGOs. The knowledge provided by the researchers serves to strengthen the political clout and arguments of the parliamentarians. This committee has written three “Women’s Budgets” which cover all sectors (Budlender, 1996, 1997, 1998). The Women’s Budget focuses on influencing three types of government spending: * programs specifically targeting women and girls or men and boys; * programs aimed at change within government, such as affirmative action to promote the interests and advancement of women employed by public service; and * mainstream expenditures, in terms of their differential impact on women and men, and different groups of women and men. So far, the initiative stressed reprioritization rather than an increase in overall government expenditure. It has also emphasized reorientation of government activity rather than changes in the overall amounts allocated to particular sectors. Yet there are still challenges, such as the financial constraints posed by the macroeconomic situation in the country and the audiences that are being reached by the initiative. Issues that need more exploration include the gender effects of fiscal decentralization, effects of donor funding on gender-targeted spending, and the need for careful analysis on inter-sectoral prioritization. The WBI emphasizes extra-governmental involvement. This is not the only model for engendering budgets in Africa. Other Southern African countries, Mozambique and Namibia, have voiced interest in the WBI. Representatives from Zambia attended a gender budget workshop in Cape Town. The Swedish International Development Authority (SIDA) is providing assistance to the Namibian Ministry of Finance for an in-government women’s budget initiative. Other Sub-Saharan African countries, such as Uganda and Tanzania, have also been developing gender budgets with a variety of approaches, priority areas, and relationships between stakeholders. In Uganda, the exercise is led by the Parliamentary Women’s Caucus, in cooperation with the associated NGO, Forum for Women in Democracy. It combines the resources of parliament and research-oriented NGOs, and in that sense it is similar to the South African WBI. At its strategic planning meeting in 1997, the Caucus decided to start a three-year gender budget initiative. The Women’s Caucus is strong and well organized as a lobby with over 50 women parliamentarians as members. Through its organizational strength, the Women’s Caucus has won a number of important legislative changes, including the clause in local government law stating that at least one-third of Executive Committee members at parish and village level should be women. In 1997, the Caucus initiated a series of activities on macroeconomics and gender, focusing on the impact of structural adjustment on poor women. The Tanzanian women’s budget, a three-year initiative, is coordinated by a coalition of NGOs headed by the Tanzania Gender Networking Program (TGNP). Structural adjustment is a major concern in this case too, which covers health and education budgets in the first year, as these sectors most concern poor rural women and men. For each of the other two years, two sectors will be covered. The Tanzanian initiative includes research at the level of technical and financial analysis of budgets, as in South Africa, and at grass-roots levels by talking with women and men. The Tanzania coalition invited women parliamentarians and government officials in the education and health ministries for a three-day training workshop in late 1997. Unlike in Uganda, no parliamentarians participated in the Tanzanian initiative. Through development and application of various tools and techniques (Box 1), women’s budgets can make a number of crucial contributions. These include efforts to: * recognize, reclaim and revalue the contributions and leadership that women make in the market economy, and in the reproductive or domestic (invisible and undervalued) spheres of the care economy, the latter absorbing the impact of macroeconomic choices leading to cuts in health, welfare and education expenditures; * assert women’s leadership in the public and productive spheres of politics, economy, and society, in parliament, business, media, culture, religious institutions, trade unions and civil society institutions; * engage in these areas by advocating a process of transformation that to take into account the needs of the poorest and the powerless; and * ensure and sustain political will by building strong coalitions of women’s organizations that is not reduced to political interventions of patronage or goodwill. Box 1: Tools to Engender Budgets Six tools and techniques have been identified by Diane Elson in order to facilitate a fill in the gaps and deficiencies in the information include. * Gender-disaggregated beneficiary assessments are used to assess the views of women and men as potential beneficiaries of public expenditure on how far current forms of service delivery meet their needs. * Gender-disaggregated public expenditure incidence analysis looks into the extent to which men and women, girls and boys, benefit from expenditure on publicly provided services. * Gender-disaggregated policy evaluations of public expenditure evaluates the policies that underlie budget appropriations in terms of their likely impact on women and men. * Gender-aware budget statements show the expected implications of the expenditure estimates in total and by Ministry for gender inequality. * Gender-disaggregated analysis of interactions between financial and time budgets make visible the implications of the national budget for household time budgets, in order to reveal the macroeconomic implications of unpaid work in social reproduction. * Gender-aware medium-term economic policy scenarios produce a medium-term macroeconomic policy framework which recognizes that women and men participate in economic activity in different ways and will contribute in different ways to medium term macroeconomic outcomes and experience different costs and benefits from macroeconomic policies. Source: Elson 1997. Further information on use of these tools can be found in Elson 1996, Demery 1996, and Esim 1995. There are no simple recipes for launching women’s budget initiatives, though lessons can be learned from each country experience by comparing strengths and weaknesses, similarities and differences. The South African political context is unique because of the post-apartheid state’s commitment to non-sexist and non-racist principles in its constitution. It might, therefore, be unrealistic to expect a similarly supportive political environment in other countries. Collaboration between researchers , NGOs, and parliamentarians in launching the initiative is proving to be effective in the South African case as well as in Uganda. III. Unpaid and Informal Work More of women’s work than men’s is left out of national accounts because of the nature of their work outside the formal labor market in subsistence production, informal employment, domestic or reproductive work and voluntary or community work. There are three uses of time (paid work, unpaid work and leisure) rather than the two that are used by neo-classical economic theory (work and leisure). How time is used, strategies to reduce the intensity of social reproduction of work, and employment-sharing are all a part of a discussion of unpaid work and paid informal work not registered in national accounts. Unpaid Work: Most women's productive activities in subsistence agriculture, in family enterprises and in the home remain invisible in labor statistics and national accounting. These "invisible" tasks constitute economically necessary work, often complementary to that of men, which are unremunerated. If the unpaid invisible work by women were fully taken into account in labor statistics, their levels of economic activity would increase from 10% to 20%. Global estimates suggest that women’s unpaid work produces an output of $11 trillion, compared to a global GDP of about $23 trillion (UNDP 1995). GDP tends to omit as much as it includes. Official GDP figures in SSA generally count only the produce actually brought to market or exported—the cash crops grown largely by men. Adding the value of unpaid work to paid work in calculating national product would lead to an increase in the value of work done by women in all societies. It is also important for accuracy and for development planning. Incorporation of women’s unpaid work into national accounts has a number of benefits (Cagatay, Elson and Grown, 1995) such as allowing more accurate analysis of: * inequality in the distribution of leisure and domestic work; * productivity changes in unpaid production; * shifts in domestic work and family welfare as a result of changes in family income and employment status of household members; and * the extent to which fictitious measurements of GDP growth can be avoided, as in the shift of production from household to market. Much progress has been made concerning the conceptual, methodological and practical implications of incorporating unpaid work in national income accounts in the last two decades. The System of National Accounts (SNA), a new set of international guidelines for national accounts which determine GDP, was revised to include all goods produced in the household and, by extension, production-related activities such as water-carrying. The SNA is only a conceptual and accounting framework applicable to all countries. Work in institutions such as the UN Statistical Commission has led to recommendations on constructing satellite accounts to provide estimates of the contributions of unpaid domestic work to national income. Although unpaid domestic and personal services (such as cooking and childcare) are still not included, the 1993 SNA suggests that alternate concepts of GDP be devised for use in satellite accounts. Currently, there is one comprehensive technique for measuring unpaid work: systematic time-use surveys to demonstrate how a person uses his or her time provide accurate estimates of unpaid household activities and show daily, weekly and seasonal patterns and their relationship to economic and non-economic activities. Such detailed accountings of how days are spent, whether at work, play, eating or sleeping, have been widely used in the industrialized countries, but in only a handful of developing nations. The techniques usually required— distribution of diaries and interviews by specially trained personnel—are frequently inappropriate to developing countries, particularly in remote rural areas where literacy rates tend to be low. Several SSA countries have agreed to include subsistence production in GNP accounts, since this was viewed as producing marketable goods. In the case of unpaid domestic and volunteer work, their inclusion in national accounting statistics has been met with more resistance. There is still a long way to making the invisible contributions of women visible, accepted, evaluated, and integrated into SSA economies. Informal Employment: Most of the world’s women who are economically active work in the informal sector. More than half the economically active women in SSA and South Asia are self-employed in the informal sector, as are about one-third in northern Africa and Asia. In Latin American countries, 30-70 percent of women workers are employed in the informal sector. In 1993, the United Nations Statistical Commission endorsed a resolution of the Fifteenth International Conference of Labor Statisticians concerning informal sector statistics and decided to include the informal sector in the Revised System of National Accounts (Box 2). Box 2: Statistical Work on the Informal Sector There are three interrelated areas of statistical work relating to the informal sector. * Informal sector in labor statistics: On labor statistics, efforts have focused on evolving a conceptual basis for collecting and analyzing data on the characteristics of informal sector businesses and their workers. However, further work needs to be done to develop methods for data collection and to have these methods implemented in countries. * Informal sector statistics in national accounts: The system of national accounts (SNA) provides the basic framework for defining what constitutes production and economic activity and methods for assessing the value of production in the economic sectors. However, better guidelines are needed on how to determine the value of production for the informal sector in relation to total production. * Development of statistics on home-based workers: This area requires specific attention, because of increasing policy concerns and the need for clarity in defining it’s composition as the group overlaps with both formal and informal employment. The SSA experiences in measuring informal employment began with Ghana and Kenya in the 1970s. Establishment censuses were followed by sample surveys in Guinea, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Senegal and Benin. The establishment approaches missed the bulk of informally employed women as home-based workers, outworkers and street vendors. Later establishment censuses in Guinea, Niger and Benin were extended to include street vendors. Since the late 1980s, household approaches and mixed survey approaches (household and establishment surveys) have been used in Mali, Niger, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and in the capitals of Cameroon, Madagascar and Tanzania. Although more national statistical offices are collecting data on informal employment, available statistics are still scarce. There are major difficulties in obtaining complete and reliable information on informal employment due to factors such as high mobility, and seasonality. Some of these problems are particularly relevant to measuring women’s informal employment. Women are more likely to be engaged in multiple activities and often concentrate in particular types of informal activities, such as food processing and sale, which require questions on secondary and tertiary activities and an oversampling of specific strata. As in other sectors, the stereotypes of interviewers and respondents lead to underreporting of women’s work and underenumeration of women operators when listing the informal units in household surveys (UNDP, 1995) . Another issue with women’s informal employment concerns home-based work. Evidence suggests that home-based work is an important source of employment for women throughout the world. Almost all home-based workers around the world are women.2 This type of work is easily under-reported when it can be confused with housework. Another major problem in data collection is linked to the distinction between paid employment and self-employment. These distinctions are more relevant for measurement purposes than for policy purposes. Laws and social protection are needed for home-based workers no matter what status of employment they have. Several measures have been identified to integrate informal employment into national policies in SSA (Perucci, 1997). Some of these are: * developing a framework for the inclusion of informal sector employment into SNA; * determining what is known about informal employment at regional and national levels by making inventory of studies, data and methodologies and reviewing existing data to assess appropriateness and gaps; * implementing regional and national programs to formulate a measurement framework; supporting improved data collection on informal sector; and promoting ready availability of improved information for the formulation of relevant policies; * coordinating activities with international agencies and networks such as the UNDP project on “Engendering Labor Force Statistics.” 1 - This Annex was prepared by Simel Esim, Consultant, Poverty Reduction and Social Development Group, Africa Region, World Bank. 2 - Evidence suggests that in Botswana, 77% of the enterprises in a nation-wide sample survey of 1,362 enterprises were home-based. In Lesotho, 60% of all enterprises are home-based. Among these, 88% of women’s manufacturing enterprises are home-based, compared to 37% of men’s. In Malawi and Zimbabwe, 54% and 77% of enterprises, respectively, are home-based. In South Africa, 71 percent of enterprises are located within a home or homestead. (Chen and Sebstad, 1998). |
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