Women's agenda budgets should be policy priority

Even though the constitutional requirement of the two-thirds gender rule has not been met, the recently concluded elections just delivered an improved success in the election of women leaders in both the legislative and executive branches of government.

This suggests that even better things are still to come. It also supports the idea that people are beginning to fully grasp how women can play leadership roles and influence economic policy.

Eliminating the prejudiced belief that women are incapable will go a long way toward persuading Kenya's large critical mass to change their perspective on women's potential to lead and drive economic policy.

The biggest challenge, however, is delivering on the promises of raising Kenyan women's incomes, reducing poverty, closing the achievement and attainment gap for girls, and improving healthcare outcomes, particularly in terms of sexual and reproductive rights, and economic freedoms.

It also entails addressing the social ills caused by the economy, such as inequality, eliminating discriminatory practices from the system for delivering public services, and working to lessen marginalisation within the institutional structure of government.

Maximising benefits for all

The government must steer policy in a way that is advantageous to either gender to accomplish this. According to conventional economics wisdom, the main objective of economic policy in terms of development is to influence and mobilise capital allocation in a way that maximises benefits for all citizens, regardless of gender, by article 27 of the Constitution.

It is clear that empowering women economically increases productivity, raises incomes, broadens economic diversification, and has other positive externalities, making gender-responsive budgeting a sound economic strategy.

To improve incomes and ultimately welfare, Engendering Budgets uses economic policy—in this case, fiscal policy—to encourage women's advancement and participation in economic activities and the labour market.

Making sure that public finance management is gender-responsive is one of the urgent issues that need to be addressed. Most budget stakeholders should be aware that, despite the constitution's groundbreaking treatment of gender equity, the public finance management law is gender-neutral. Aligning that law to adhere to the constitutional principle of gender equity is the most important policy requirement.

It will be necessary to use specific gender-responsive budgeting techniques at each of the six stages of budgeting to make the law more gender-responsive. There are six stages in Kenya, primarily consisting of laws and policies, planning and setting priorities, budgeting and programming, implementation, results, and impact.

Budget foundation

The foundation for gender budgeting is already provided by the Constitution and treaties. The main challenge during the programming and budgeting stage is figuring out which interventions are most successful. In the end, achieving women's rights is the main goal.

The biggest undoing of fiscal policy is that policymakers tend to commit implicit bias when they direct economic policy. "Implicit bias" refers to the attitudes that policymakers have toward individuals without being aware of it.

An illustration is when the national assembly levied an excise tax on resins. This action raised the cost of diapers since resin is a major input in the manufacturing of diapers.

The three stages at which the budget reform of engendering the budget should be implemented are the budget preparation processes, the revenue side of the budget, and the expenditure side of the budget.

This will require amendments to the Public Finance Management law to require the National Treasury and policymakers in the ministries, departments and agencies to adhere to gender-responsive budgeting rules, which already form part of the Kenyan law.

Specific commitments

At the budget preparation stage, the main document that should state the specific gender-responsive budgeting commitment for that financial year is the budget circular.

According to Section 36 of the Public Finance Management Law, the medium-term budget policy framework, constitutional timeliness and requirements for key budget preparation activities, programme performance reviews, the form and content of the budget, and a framework for public participation are all covered by the budget circular.

This will alter the economic outcomes for Kenyan women and compel accounting officers to implement fiscal policy priorities that are more gender sensitive. These are some of the areas in the budget preparation processes and execution.

A lot of work still needs to be done to make gender-responsive budgeting a reality. To address this, it may be necessary to amend the primary public finance management law to mandate that accounting officers from various ministries, departments and agencies, as well as the Cabinet Secretary for National Treasury take gender-responsive budgeting into account when preparing budgets and submitting them to Parliament.

Leo Kemboi is an economist at the Institute of Economic Affairs and a researcher at the University of Nairobi Women’s Economic Empowerment Hub’s Gender-Responsive Budgeting Project. This project focuses on an analysis of the national and county government budgets, as well as regional budgets and utilises the findings to advocate for the increased budgetary allocation to the sectors that contribute to the care economy.