Financing for Gender Equality and Women’s Rights Is Central to Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals
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The recent twenty-year review of the Beijing Platform for Action found that underinvestment in gender equality and women’s empowerment has contributed to slow and uneven progress in all 12 critical areas of concern. Inadequate financing hinders the implementation of gender-responsive laws and policies. Even in countries that are considered to spend significant resources on gender equality, data shows that these allocations range from a mere 0.5% to 21.9% of the national budget. Financing gaps for implementing national actions plans on gender equality are often as high as 90%. Official Development Assistance (ODA) too accounts for a fraction of overall aid with only 5% targeting gender as a principal objective.
Mobilizing sufficient financing for the full implementation of national gender equality commitments is stymied by a number of factors including: (1) lack of evidence on gaps and corresponding political commitment to allocate resources to gender; (2) lack of alignment between fiscal policies and gender equality objectives coupled with weak capacity to integrate gender into national planning and budgeting processes; (3) insufficient prioritization of gender equality in other financing streams such as Official Development Assistance (ODA), private and innovative financing; and (4) lack of accountability and monitoring mechanisms to hold public and private actors to account.
