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Women's rights groups call for a gender responsive budget
Zimbabwe Women's Resource Centre and Network (ZWRCN)
November 13, 2002

Women’s Rights groups are hoping that the 2003 Budget, to be announced by the Minister of Finance and Economic Development Thursday, will take the needs and concerns of women into account.

"The budget can be a very powerful tool for bringing about gender equality. It is one of the most vital instruments of planning for any country, institution, community, family and individual. It shows where resources will be collected and how they will be allocated. It in many ways illustrates the priorities of a nation, organization or groups of people," says the Zimbabwe Women’s Resource Centre and Network (ZWRCN), a women’s group involved in research, lobbying and advocacy for a more gender sensitive budget.

"On the surface of it, budgets and economic policies may appear to be gender neutral. The relationships between surplus and deficit, tax, expenditure, revenue and gender are not always clear. So in their formulation, budgets often ignore the different and very specific needs and social roles and responsibilities of men and women and different groups of men and women. Traditional budgets certainly ignore the contribution women make to an economy through unpaid care work be it by fetching water, collecting firewood, farming, child caring responsibilities, home based nursing, etc" the organization said.

A Gendered Budget is not different to the regular budget a country may present. It is rather a process of budgeting that takes into account how the budget affects the different groups of men and women, boys and girls who make up the nation’s population. It analyses the extent to which men and women are involved in and participate as tax payers, stakeholders and citizens in determining how resources are generated, monitoring government allocation and expenditure, public service delivery, tax, all from a gender sensitive perspective.

Gender budgets, recognizing the limited resources a nation may have, tend to encourage a reallocation of resources in terms of priority and activity rather than an increase in overall government expenditure. It places emphasis on the efficient and prudent use of resources in a way that improves living standards for all people, male and female. Gendered budgets will, for example, take into consideration such things as the very different impacts HIV/AIDS has on women and men.

When the idea of a national AIDS Levy was first discussed in 1999, it seemed a brilliant home-grown response mechanism to an epidemic that was not only knocking the economy, but also devastating the lives of the people infected and affected by HIV. That three prevent of every formally employed worker’s earnings would go to a centralised fund whose resources would then be used in the management of HIV/AIDS made sense in the absence of other sources of finance.

At the time though, there was much debate about the imposition of a levy on the salaries of workers who were already feeling the pinch of very high taxes. Citizens, male and female were concerned about how as tax payers, they had not been consulted in the development of the Levy. They were also worried that they would not be able to monitor the movement and disbursement of the resources that had been collected from their pockets. Tax payers wanted to know, and rightly so, how the resources would be tracked to those households, communities and workplaces that were feeling the impact of HIV/AIDS the most. They also wanted to know how much influence they could have in determining the priorities of the AIDS Levy.

Women were particularly concerned that the burden of home-based care that they were carrying would not be lightened by the introduction of the tax. They felt that would most likely be subsiding a weakening public health that has transferred the care of HIV/AIDS patients out of hospitals and clinics and into the homes.

The Levy has now changed names; it has become the National AIDS Trust Fund (NATF). Structures such as Village AIDS Action Committees (VAACs), Ward AIDS Action Committees (WAACs), District AIDS Action Committees (DAACs) and Provincial AIDS Action Committees (PAACs), led by the National AIDS Council have been put in place to disburse the resources that are collected monthly, but the questions of accountability and transparency that were raised in 1999 have largely remained unanswered.

Women are still bearing the brunt of an epidemic that continues to cause hardship to the nation and the region. At the end of last year (2001) UNAIDS estimated that 2.3 million Zimbabweans were living with HIV/AIDS. Of infected adults, 1.2 million (60 percent) were women. Zimbabwe's adult HIV prevalence was 33.7 percent, the third highest in the world.

The NATF has not taken a gender sensitive response to HIV/AIDS. Its priorities are Research, Prevention, Care and Mitigation. The rest of the world is looking at access to treatment as a priority for any HIV/AIDS resources. The Care part of the Fund has remained blind to the unpaid, uncounted and home based care work thousands of women are doing across the country to manage HIV/AIDS.

As the 2003 budget is announced citizens will be asking when the accounts of the NATF will be open to public scrutiny. They will be looking to the Auditor General’s office to restore confidence to a mechanism that if managed efficiently and effectively could improve the way HIV/AIDS is handled nationally.

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