‘Budget allocation small for empowering women’

Speakers at a seminar on Tuesday said the budget allocation was insufficient to empower women and achieve gender equality target and recommended sector-wise advancement in light of sustainable development goals.

At a seminar titled "An Analysis of Gender Sensitive Budgeting: Bangladesh Perspective” jointly organised by SANEM and Bangladesh Mahila Parishad on Tuesday, speakers noted that 51 per cent of women were victims of child marriage in 2020 when the country grappled with the coronavirus pandemic. 

The rate of gender-based violence is also concerning, with 54.7 per cent of women being victims of intimate partner violence in 2015, SANEM Research Director Prof Dr Sayema Haque Bidisha said in the keynote presentation. 

“The labour force participation rate of women has not improved much from 2010, with the percentage of male and female labour participation rate being 38.6 per cent and 36.37 per cent, respectively, in 2017," she said. 

The percentage of the female population is glaringly higher in NEET, at 47 per cent, compared to merely 10 per cent of the male population in NEET. The unemployment rate of women is also more than twice that of men, at 6.8 per cent, Prof Bidisha said.

“Between fiscal years 2009-10 and 2021-22, expenditure allocation towards women has gone up. On the other hand, several notable gender-sensitive projects have been unapproved after funding was discontinued,” she said.

“The proportion of directly gender-sensitive projects have gone down by 2 per cent at the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs during this period,” she mentioned.

BRAC Youth Platform Opeartions Lead Samanjar Chowdhury highlighted how the pandemic had increased school dropout rates in both male and female children. Along with that, the instances of child marriage and child labour have increased.

“Employment is not the same as empowerment. The garment workers have no financial independence over the salary they earn. For empowerment to happen, it has to happen across all classes, especially rural women and gender minorities such as transgender people," she said

The keynote put emphasis on the need to strengthen monitoring and evaluation of projects, with the implementation status of the programmes being monitored regularly. 

It suggested prioritising projects that directly target SDGs (Goal- 5,8,3 and 4) during budget allocation. The importance of impact analysis and gender-sensitivity analysis was stressed upon, along with the need for improved coordination between ministries. 

It also recommended gradually introducing international best practices such as gender audit, ex-ante, and ex-post gender impact assessment of policies in gender budgeting.  

The webinar was chaired by Bangladesh Mahila Parishad President Dr Fauzia Moslem, while SANEM Executive Director Dr Selim Raihan spoke, among others.