A lot of work and sensitisation needs to be done in many countries in southern Africa to ensure that they produce and implement national budgets that are gender sensitive. In its 1997 Declaration on Gender and Development, Southern African Development Community (SADC) member states made a commitment to ensure that gender is routinely taken into account in all sectors. National budgets world-wide are often assumed to affect everyone more or less equally, and have been instrumental in perpetrating and reproducing gender biases, yet they also hold the possibility for transforming existing gender inequalities.
Barbara Lopi and Priscilla Mng’anya