Expert's Take: Making sure women and girls actually benefit from government funding

Author: Sanghamitra Dhar

Imagine you are a woman living in a rural area. A government scheme exists to help you — for seeds, for healthcare, for safety. You are eligible. But you never heard about it, so you cannot access it and benefit from it.

This is not an unusual story. It is, in fact, what gender-responsive budgeting is designed to address. In the country, for over two decades UN Women has been working with the national and subnational Governments to build the ecosystem. I joined the discourse in 2017 and have ever since been hooked to finding solutions to ensure the public funds reach the last mile of women and girls.

Gender-responsive budgeting is a mechanism to review how government funds can be channelled to address gender equality. But it is not just about the allocation. It is about whether that money is reported, spent, and can be tracked to show it truly supports well-being of women and girls.

Gender-responsive budgeting sees women not just as beneficiaries of government programmes but as rights-holders, people who are entitled to resources and to whom the Government is accountable.

The process works in a few steps: sensitize government officials on how to review their budget document through a gender lens, publish the commitment through the gender budget statement. Understanding the difference between what is allocated at the start of a budget year and what is spent by the end of it is at the heart of gender-responsive budgeting. Those numbers are often very different, and asking why is where begins.

How does any of this matter to the woman in the village? Because if a scheme/programme is not designed with her in mind — if the information does not reach her, if the service point is inaccessible, if the official records assume she is not the decision maker — she will not benefit even if she is eligible. Gender-responsive budgeting pushes the system to ask: Who is actually being reached? Who is being left out?

The factor I come back to repeatedly is convergence: the ability to bring the right people together, and to keep them there. A government does not function as a single entity. The finance department holds the money. The planning department sets the priorities. The social welfare or women and child development departments carry the mandate for gender equality. For public money to reach people effectively and efficiently, these three departments need to work together.

The second factor … is sustained engagement. Gender-responsive budgeting in India is not a legal mandate. It is a policy commitment kept alive by government officers who take it on as an additional responsibility, year after year.

The other lesson is about the importance of convening. This is where UN Women adds real value. Our role is to bring the right stakeholders together: finance officials, planning departments, social advocates, civil society and communities, to build consensus around practical reforms.

What continues to inspire me is the moment when someone truly understands what gender-responsive budgeting is about. It often begins with something as simple as opening a budget document and walking through how public resources are allocated. Suddenly the queries change: Who is being left out? Are these resources actually reaching women? What outcomes are we trying to achieve?

Once people begin to see budgets as instruments for advancing gender equality rather than just financial documents, the conversation changes. That shift in perspective is what drives institutional change, and it is what continues to motivate me in this work.