Gender-Responsive Budgeting through the CBMS Lens

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This paper results from a series of international workshops that brought together CBMS and GRB practitioners to discuss how the community-based monitoring system (CBMS) can be used to facilitate gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) at the local level. To provide conceptual background to the discussion, the paper highlights two points where CBMS and GRB initiatives converge and complement each other. On the one hand, it points out that both serve as guideposts for government targeting and prioritizing of the poor and other vulnerable sectors of society. On the other hand, both are also centrally concerned with policymaking. CBMS was seen from the start as a tool to inform evidence-based policymaking while GRB emerged out of the realization that unless gender policies and plans have adequate accompanying budgets, they are not worth the paper they are written on. It also notes that the standard CBMS data already provide valuable input for GRBs (e.g., sexdisaggregated analysis of the situation of local people in terms of aspects such as education and economic activity and situation analysis of accessibility of services such as sanitation, nutrition and health). However, the potential of the existing instrument to support LLGRB work can be further enhanced.