Gender mainstreaming in national accounts and national budget : Technical note, ECA programme on production and use of gender disaggregated data for gender responsive policy planning, implementation and evaluation in Africa

Abstract

The main issue in policy making in most African countries is that national statistics are gender blind in several areas. Firstly, much as household production is on an equal footing with the market economy, existing macroeconomic frameworks including national accounts, budgets and policies are based on only market economy. Secondly, economics generally portrays households in which women provide most of the labor as consumers and fails to recognize households as producers using their own labor and capital. Thirdly, with few exceptions, economics fails to discuss the allocation of time to various processes of household production where neither inputs nor outputs are remunerated.