Compendium of best practices on gender mainstreaming:Engendering national budgets:the case of Tanzania

Abstract

In this report, gender-sensitive budgeting will be used interchangeably with gender budget initiative (GBI) to reflect the reality in Tanzania, the main focus of this report. The impetus for examining the differential impact of national budgets between women and men and girls and boys is based on the realization that macroeconomic policies are not gender neutral as previously suggested. As indicated above, gender-sensitive analysis or budgeting was initiated in Australia around the mid-1980s where it was termed 'women's budget' to emphasize the greater institutional and structural barriers to women in accessing productive resources in general and national budgets in particular.This report will argue, an important lesson from the Australian Initiative is the imperative of partnership between government and the civil society to ensure the sustainability of an initiative. According to Lowe Morna (1998: 10) the factors cited below, inter alia, explain the failure of the Australian women '5 budget: Failure to engage civil society; Lack of commitment of individual ministers and senior management to raising women's economic and social status; The achievements of earlier years leading to complacency among the younger generation of women, although there are still vast discrepancies between the economic situation of men and women. Waning political support: political changes in Australia led to issues of concern to women being downgraded, the emphasis of the new government is on "choices" rather than rights.