Governance and national planning

Many women in the Arab region suffer from a limited access to basic national resources. Gender-Responsive Budgeting is a transformative approach that aims to strengthen the effectiveness of public policy related to financial resources allocation. The approach starts by gender analysis to determine and reduce the gaps between men and women in access to human rights. Thus, the national resources will be reallocated, without being increased, in order to redirect funds to priority actions aiming at reducing gender gaps.

UN Women is at the forefront of the global mobilization for the implementation of Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB), and provided support to GRB initiatives in more than 60 countries, including many countries in the Arab region. UN Women has also developed partnerships with key actors in the global and national levels to demonstrate the relevance of GRB in the effectiveness of women human rights and the achievement of development goals.

In Morocco, GRB initiative launched since 2002, recorded significant progress in terms of strengthening gender-based monitoring and evaluation of public policy; experimentation of the results-based and gender-sensitive finance management; strengthening planning and budgeting processes at the local level, and in terms of reinforcing knowledge sharing mechanisms through the implementation of an electronic knowledge management platform. In 2012, this initiative culminated in the organization of the GRB International High Level Conference, which highlighted the intense need of GRB community of practitioners of reinforcing experiences and best practices exchange.

UN Women Regional Office for the Arab States and the Multi-Country office in Morocco organized a roundtable meeting on Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) in December 2013 in Casablanca, in collaboration with the UN Women programme “Increasing Accountability in Financing for Gender Equality. The programme seeks to strengthen accountability for the implementation of gender equality commitments in financing decisions of national governments and funding partners. Eight countries from the region participated in this event (Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Palestine and Yemen). The workshop introduced the GRB concept to participants and gave an overview on the different adaptations of the approach at the level of the participating countries. A second workshop was held in January 2015 to capitalize on the achievements of the first workshop, and to consolidate and deepen the participants’ knowledge and capacities through a focus on key GRB steps.  Nine countries attended this second workshop (Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia and Yemen).