A survey of national budgets around the world has revealed a gap between commitment and change when it comes to gender.
Governments around the world are making budgets more gender-responsive. But are they becoming more accountable? This year, the International Budget Partnership began exploring that question through the Open Budget Survey 2025, which, for the first time, included a question collecting evidence on governments’ use of gender-responsive budgeting tools.
Roughly half of the 82 countries surveyed report using at least one gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) tool. Governments are tagging gender-related expenditures, publishing gender-budget statements, conducting gender-impact assessments, and integrating gender considerations into performance frameworks. These findings suggest that gender-responsive budgeting has moved from the margins of public finance into the mainstream.
This is an important achievement. For decades, feminist economists, activists, and civil society organisations have challenged the notion that budgets are neutral technical instruments. They have argued that decisions about taxation, spending, public services, infrastructure, debt, and social protection shape opportunities, risks, and life chances differently for diverse groups, including women.
Their advocacy has been critical to the mainstreaming of gender-responsive budgeting. However, although many governments are tracking gender-responsive expenses, far fewer are asking whether fiscal policy is changing the lived realities of women and girls.
These findings also carry important implications for philanthropy. While donors have long advanced gender equality through advocacy and innovation, public budgets remain the largest and most sustainable source of financing for gender equality. Strengthening how governments allocate and spend public resources can achieve a scale of impact that philanthropy cannot.
The next phase of gender-responsive budgeting therefore depends less on adopting new tools and more on strengthening the institutions, incentives and accountability mechanisms that turn fiscal commitments into tangible outcomes.
From spending visibility to accountability
Among the 82 countries assessed, the most common GRB tools are front-end instruments such as Gender Budget Tagging, Gender-Responsive Budget Statements, and integrating gender analysis into performance frameworks, which help governments identify and track gender priorities in the budget.
Making gender priorities visible is an important first step. But OBS 2025 suggests this doesn’t necessarily translate into stronger accountability: far fewer countries have adopted back-end tools that assess whether those commitments actually produce results, such as the tools that move beyond classification to ask whether gender-responsive budgeting is driving real change. And fewer still show evidence of that gender-related spending or impact within the Executive Budget Proposal itself, the government’s primary budget-planning document.
Accountability also requires meaningful public participation. Without the active engagement of women’s rights organisations, feminist movements and civil society, gender-responsive budgeting risks becoming a technical exercise rather than a mechanism for accountability.
Capacity is another critical piece of the accountability puzzle. The quality of gender-responsive budgeting depends on how well public institutions understand and apply its tools. Philanthropic investment can strengthen institutional capacity across governments, while supporting independent civic oversight to ensure that budget commitments lead to measurable outcomes.
Looking beyond spending
OBS 2025 highlights another blind spot. Only three countries, Norway, South Africa, and Benin, conduct distributional assessments of tax and welfare policies.
Fiscal policy shapes gender equality through both revenue and expenditure decisions. The taxes governments collect, the incentives they provide, and the transfers they fund all influence how resources, opportunities and risks are distributed across society.
The limited use of distributional analysis suggests that many gender budgeting systems continue to focus on spending while paying far less attention to the gendered impacts of taxation and revenue policies. Yet women and historically marginalised communities experience fiscal policy as a whole. Understanding who contributes to public revenues, who benefits from public spending and who bears the costs of fiscal adjustment is essential to assessing whether fiscal policy advances or undermines gender equality.
This is also where the strategic value of philanthropy becomes clear. Philanthropic resources are finite. Public budgets are recurrent and measured in billions. A relatively modest investment that improves how governments analyse, allocate or evaluate public resources can influence multiple budget cycles and entire sectors of expenditure. Few philanthropic investments offer comparable leverage. Strengthening fiscal institutions is therefore a strategy for increasing the effectiveness and durability of every future investment in gender equality.
A few global leaders
Leadership looks different across contexts. Brazil, Rwanda, and South Africa illustrate different pathways toward more developed gender-responsive budgeting systems.
Brazil shows how gender priorities can be linked to planning and budget decisions. Women’s equality is treated as a cross-cutting priority in national planning, and the budget includes specific programmes and actions focused on women’s economic autonomy, violence prevention, equal decision-making, care policy and rural women.
Rwanda demonstrates how gender-responsive budgeting can be institutionalised across government and embedded in routine planning and budgeting processes. Gender is treated as a cross-cutting priority in national, sector, and district plans, while ministries and districts prepare Gender Budget Statements that connect these priorities to budget allocations and results.
Gender-sensitive spending reviews add another layer by examining how fiscal policies and public programs address gender and social inclusion. The Gender Monitoring Office, in partnership with civil society, is taking further steps to audit whether budget commitments are reaching the intended beneficiaries and improving service delivery.
South Africa illustrates the value of connecting gender-responsive budgeting to a wider system of planning, monitoring, evaluation, and auditing. Its national gender-responsive planning, budgeting, monitoring, evaluation, and auditing framework (GRPBMEA), creates a basis for tracking implementation across departments, while gender-disaggregated tax data helps extend the analysis beyond spending.
These examples show that stronger gender-responsive budgeting systems do not rely on a single tool. They combine visibility with mechanisms that support implementation, monitoring, and assessment. They also show that progress is uneven. Even countries with more developed systems still face challenges in using gender budget information to shape decisions, assess impact and hold institutions accountable. Gender-responsive budgeting becomes more meaningful when governments move beyond identifying and reporting gender priorities and begin asking whether public resources are actually advancing gender equality in practice.
From commitment to change
The OBS 2025 findings suggest that while gender is increasingly present in budget systems, it is far less present in the mechanisms that assess whether fiscal policy is changing unequal outcomes. The risk is that gender-responsive budgeting becomes an exercise in classification rather than a tool for accountability and change.
For philanthropy, this presents a strategic opportunity. Governments will always remain the primary financiers of gender equality. Philanthropy’s comparative advantage lies in supporting innovation, generating independent evidence, strengthening capacities and accountability institutions, and enabling civic participation. These investments improve the quality of public decision-making and increase the likelihood that future budgets allocate resources more equitably.
The next generation of gender-responsive budgeting therefore requires more than additional tools. It requires stronger accountability institutions, meaningful public participation, better evidence on outcomes and sustained political commitment to act on that evidence. Philanthropy has a unique opportunity to support each of these building blocks while helping governments move from reporting gender commitments to delivering measurable change. Ultimately, the value of gender-responsive budgeting will not be determined by the number of tools governments adopt. It will be determined by whether budgets contribute to more equitable societies.
Note: This blog originally appeared in Alliance magazine and is cross-posted here with permission. Read the original article here.
