Background

The Budgeting for Reproductive Rights resource pack was produced under a UNFPA/UNIFEM Strategic Partnership aimed at developing a Coordinated Approach for Effective Technical Assistance to Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB). This partnership is intended to build the capacity of UNFPA's country support teams (CSTs) to provide support in using the GRB approach to in-country partners. The partnership draws largely on UNIFEM's experience in supporting GRB initiatives in over twenty countries.

Since 2000.

Gender Responsive Budgeting encompasses a broad range of possible activities. The types of activities for which country partners request support are also very diverse. Thus, it is not possible to provide simple recipes for either the country partners or for UNFPA CSTs. The purpose of this resource pack is to provide relevant knowledge that may facilitate mainstreaming gender-responsive approaches into reproductive health on one hand and the inclusion of specific aspects of gender inequality and disadvantage into national policy frameworks, on the other hand.

Overall, the UNFPA/UNIFEM initiative aims to:

• expose CSTs to the range of GRB tools and activities available and how these relate to different development situations;
• provide CSTs with basic materials (in the form of this resource pack) on different aspects of relevance to GRB as well as references to further reading on each aspect;
• provide a smaller group of CST members with practical experience in a workshop setting on how to respond to the different requests of countries.

Two pilot workshops were conducted in early 2006 to validate the content of the resource pack and develop the training manual on GRB. These workshops were intended to assist participants in using the resource pack, gaining the skills to use GRB in different circumstances and supporting others in applying GRB tools.