Gender-responsive budgeting failing women as social grant cuts deepen inequality

Résumé détaillé

The government has promised a huge gender-responsive budget, but it is full of contradictions and is offset by cuts in social grants that will deepen women’s ...

The government has promised a huge gender-responsive budget, but it is full of contradictions and is offset by cuts in social grants that will deepen women’s vulnerability.

Koketso Masenya is a Researcher/Analyst associated with the Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ).

At more than a quarter of a trillion rand, it is a figure the government is touting for gender-priority interventions, money supposedly utilised to address gender disparities across a range of sectors.

While R342.1-billion may seem to be a large amount, pulling back the curtain reveals that this spending is a catalogue of existing government programmes and activities in which women are listed as the intended beneficiaries. Existing analysis doesn’t tell us if these interventions are addressing the gender disparities the government has identified, or if these allocations really produce better outcomes in women’s lives. The recent Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement is an example of this dynamic.

South Africa’s Gender Responsive Planning Budgeting Monitoring Evaluation and Auditing Framework, introduced in 2019, was developed to target structural inequality through mainstreaming gender into all government systems. Currently, it is difficult to tell if the framework is achieving this mandate.

It operates with limited specific indicators, targets and outcomes. The annual Gender Budget Statement communicates spending purportedly designed to tackle gender disparities, and highlights issues such as severe food insecurity among women-headed households, and women’s low labour force participation.

However, it does not examine how these relate to intersecting structural conditions, such as unpaid care work, economic exclusion, sexism and patriarchal and societal norms, nor does it show how spending achieves clear indicators, measurable targets and meets identified needs in a specific sector.

In this year’s Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement, the National Treasury announced a reprioritised R5.1-billion allocation for…

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