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by QW+ staff writer
Budgets are not neutral: Why Gender-Responsive Budgeting matters
By René Sparks
On June 26, 2025, the Budget Justice Coalition (BJC) co hosted a Gender-Responsive Budgeting Workshop.
The workshop included Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ), Section 27, Rural Health Advocacy Project (RHAP), TB Accountability Consortium (TBAC), Equal Education (EE), Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCISS), Black Sash, Alternative Information and Development Centre (AIDC), South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) and Youth Capital. The session’s objectives were to develop a unified understanding of what Gender-Responsive Budgeting (GRB) is, the possible challenges and opportunities and how to strategise, advocate and amplify the messaging around GRB.
Budgets are political documents, they tell us who counts
Each year, national, provincial, and local governments craft budgets that decide how public funds are raised and spent. These documents may seem technical – full of numbers, percentages, and line items but they are, in fact, deeply political. They reflect whose needs matter, whose voices are heard, and whose lives are made visible.
Gender-responsive budgeting: naming the inequality embedded in numbers
Gender-responsive budgeting is not about creating a “women’s budget”. It’s about ensuring that public spending and revenue policies reflect the different realities of women, men, and gender-diverse people, inclusive of children and the elderly. It asks a bold but necessary question: Does this budget reduce or reinforce gender inequality?
For gender-responsive budgeting to be successful it needs to be centralised in a place of power to ensure systematic and intentional application and accountability. Gender-responsive budgeting also requires the budget in its entirety to be responsive to gender. It further requires acknowledging our history as a country and the specific historical contexts that shaped who we are rather than merely searching for solutions within a vacuum. We need to understand what oursocio-economic problems are in order to contextualise our responses, rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach.
Gender-responsive budgeting as a feminist tool for systemic justice
Across the world, from South Africa to Uganda, from India to Argentina, gender-responsive budgeting has emerged as a tool to build fairer, more just societies. It requires us to look beyond surface-level spending and interrogate:
- Who benefits from this policy?
- Who is left out?
- Whose unpaid care work makes it all possible?
In a country like South Africa, where the legacy of apartheid still shapes access to health, education, housing, and safety, gender-responsive budgeting becomes a way to reclaim public resources for justice.
Budgets that speak to reality
A gender-responsive budget would fund, but not be limited, to:
- Safe shelters for LGBTQIA+ youth and survivors of violence
- Childcare programmes that free up women’s time and labour
- Menstrual health products in schools
- Support for community caregivers, who often work without pay or recognition
It would also ensure that public infrastructure – from our clinics to our transport system– are intentionally designed with safety and access for all genders in mind.
Participation is power
Gender-responsive budgeting isn’t and shouldn’t be a technical exercise. It’s a democratic participatory practice. It demands that those most affected by inequality, including women, queer people, informal workers, rural communities, children and the elderly, are included in planning and decision-making. It values lived experience as much as economic data and speaks to the context and not merely the numbers.
As feminist economist Pregs Govender once said,
“To budget is to choose. Every cut and every allocation speaks to whose lives are valued and whose are not.”
Moving forward
South Africa was once a global leader in gender-responsive budgeting through the Women’s Budget Initiative (WBI), led by fierce feminists like Govender and Debbie Budlender. While that momentum has slowed, the urgency remains.
Whether you’re a civil servant, activist, community leader, or just someone who cares about justice, ask what your government’s budget says about your priorities and then ask, who is missing from this conversation and why?
Because until our budgets reflect our most vulnerable, they are incomplete and remain unjust.