Opening Remarks by UN Women Regional Programme Director Pacific SRO, Elzira Sagynbaeva for GRB Workshop - Nadi, Fiji

Dear Participants, Resource Persons, Ladies and gentlemen, a very good morning to you all and a special welcome to all participants and our Resource Persons who have travelled from abroad. A very warm welcome to Fiji, Bula Vinaka.

I would like to acknowledge representatives from the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat and the Gender Adviser from the Secretariat of the Community (SPC).

UN Women Priorities
Let me begin, by saying that UN Women is guided by its Global Strategy and the Pacific SRO is committed to addressing gender equality in the areas of “Women’s Leadership, Economic Empowerment of Women, Ending Violence Against Women, Women, Peace and Security and Humanitarian Response, and National Planning and budgeting”.

The UN Women’s GRB programme in essence, seeks to contribute to transform and influence planning and budgeting processes and policies to reflect responsiveness to principles of gender equality and make changes in resource allocations including donor funding and aid assistance towards women’s priorities.

Gender Equality
Pacific Island Countries acknowledge the disadvantaged situation of women and girls as all of them have adopted the Beijing Platform for Action,the Beijing Declaration and the Pacific Platform for Action.

The MDGs due in 2015 again show that some Pacific Island Countries are unlikely to achieve Goal 3.

Most of the PICs ratified CEDAW and other key Human Rights conventions. Some countries ratified CEDAW 15 – 20 years ago like PNG (95), Fiji (95), and Samoa (92). However, in all countries there is a long way to go to ensure alignment of national legislation in support of the CEDAW.

A number of CEDAW articles directly speak about elimination of discrimination against women in social and economic sector. 

Despite these commitments, gaps still exist in the allocation of resources.

At this juncture, we need to remind ourselves that gender equality and the empowerment of women is our collective responsibility.

On that note, I very much appreciate the participation of senior officials from the Ministries of Planning and Ministries of Finance and of course our NGO partners.

I also noted that some of you are already planning to adopt GRB. 

Therefore I would like to urge you to make good use of this opportunity and learn as much as you can and am positive that we together with other partners can all work together to achieve those aspirations.

Gender Responsive Budget
As we all know, the budget is one of the most powerful instruments of a country’s system of governance.

It is the political apparatus that makes possible the translation of a Government’s vision into policies and programmes that affect the wellbeing of a country’s citizens.

For GE to become real there is a need for broad based national Inclusive Economic Growth policies.

According to available data, the income inequality in the Pacific countries has been growing.

The Gini coefficient ranges from 0.39 in Kiribati to as high as 0.47 in Samoa.

We can say that rural women and girls are often among the most disadvantaged groups of population in all Pacific countries.

At the same time, there are other vulnerable groups that are excluded from development for various reasons – because of their geographical isolation; ethnic status, age, HIV status and so on.

There have been a number of tools developed in support of inclusive growth – including MDG costing, performance based budgeting as well as Gender Responsive budgeting.

The concept behind GRB is simple.

We all know that the budget is the most important policy tool of government.

Governments may have top quality policies on reproductive health, Gender Based Violence, or HIV/AIDS But if it doesn’t allocate the necessary money to implement it, it will remain to be a beautifully written paper.

GRB is not about separate budgets for men and women. It is also not about seeing how much money is allocated for women or girls or for gender projects.

GRB is about mainstreaming – ensuring that ultimately there is gender awareness in all the policies and budgets of government agencies.

GRB work involves looking at the impact of government budgets on different social groups: women, men, needs of young people and old; rural and urban, rich and poor.

Conclusion
I hope that the debate will not be limited to the role of Women Ministries and national women machineries in promoting GRB.

It is really about how to apply the principles of gender responsive budgeting across all sectors in influencing national planning and budget processes.

This is why I was extremely happy to learn from my colleagues that country delegations included representative from various ministries; a very important step in establishing a common understanding among decision makers and planners on how to move the gender responsive agenda forward.

I am positive that after this workshop, in addition to those already committed, some of you will see it necessary to influence and commit your countries to pilot inclusive planning and GRB, and subsequently, begin to adopt gender responsive budgeting to allow your countries to fully realize the various commitments and global goals you hope to implement and more importantly to improve the lives of women, men, boys and girls in your respective countries.

With those words I have much pleasure in declaring this 3 day Gender Responsive Budgeting workshop open.

Thank you!