By Kwamboka Oyaro

The national budgets in African countries are general and do not address specific gender needs, a workshop at the Sixth Conference on Women heard yesterday. But since 1995 some countries have come up with frameworks for training people skills on gender budget analysis.

"We can talk of engendering the budget but if we do not have people who are gender insensitive at the policy-making level, then we are doing nothing," says Ugandan Angela Nakafeero who presented a paper on her country's progress since Beijing. In Uganda training on engendering the budget has been going on in three government sectors, Agriculture, Education, and health, Gender and Finance Ministries.

Tanzania and South Africa also draw up such women's budgets where the implication of national spending on gender is analysed. Women's budgets are innovative because they provide a blow by blow account of how every national shilling, rand or birr affects women. Gender budgets provide a way of assessing whether spending is appropriate to women's advancement.

They would, for example, look at whether government's spend on arms rather than on health and education, areas which are vital to women's advancement. "These are the ministries that women are immensely involved. Once an average Ugandan is no longer seen as a man in the civil service but a woman in subsistence farming, then we will be making headway in making gender sensitive budgets," said Nakafeero.

By Ferial Haffajee

Women's empowerment demands that they get involved in macro-economic policy decisions.

That's the message from the World Bank and from the Council for the Economic Empowerment of Women in Africa (CEWA), delivered at a workshop this week.

CEWA representatives said: "Governments must take women to meetings with the World Bank. We must ask with regard to women in the economy 'Are we in the ring? Or still dancing on the sidelines.''

Budget decisions affect the resources available for institutional mechanisms and determine how much goes into social services like health, education and welfare. Zambia and South Africa are examples of countries where women have made inroads into giving macro-economic policy a gender dimension.

In Zambia, activists have shaped anti-poverty programmes that have women at their heart. In South Africa, an annual Women's Budget provides a gendered critique of national spending. It's been so successful that government now disaggregates the budget by gender.

The World Bank's representatives told the same workshops that women's budgets are examples of how women must get involved in policy-making. A World Bank study - Gender, Growth and Poverty Reduction - has traced the links between poverty and gender inequality.

The Bank found that women are essential economic agents in Africa, but that female asset inequality, among other factors, has played a significant role in poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. It found that growth could have doubled if inequalities in formal employment and schooling were eradicated. The finding is a challenge because it makes the link between African prosperity and gender equality. The Bank has recommended that:

• women be included in public policy
• efforts be made to reduce women's time burden by improving water supply, transport and sanitation
• health and education provision is improved
• access to credit, production technology and other assets including land, labour and capital
• women's work be included in national statistics.