The Dominican Republic expressed its commitment to gender equity and equality in its Political Constitution of 2010, which established the State’s commitment to incorporate the gender perspective in all its actions.

In 2012, the government launched the 2030 National Development Strategy, which stresses the need for a public finance management model that promotes the inclusion of the gender and life cycle perspectives in the design and implementation of the State’s General Budget with a focus on the allocation of resources in priority areas to overcome inequalities.

In this context, the PLAMEG II (2007-2017) and PLANEG III (2020-2030) National Gender Equality and Equity Plans refer to the national objectives related to the incorporation of the gender approach in public planning and the budgets of all state entities.

To fulfill these mandates, in 2016 the Ministry of Women, the Ministry of Economy, Planning and Development (MEPyD), the General Budget Directorate, and the Ministry of Public Administration, with support from UN Women and the European Union, signed an interinstitutional coordination agreement to implement the Cross-Cutting Policy on General Equality and Equity in the execution of the 2030 National Development Strategy.

The first outcome of this process was the development of budgeting guidelines that incorporated the gender approach in the formulation of the 2016 budget. This was in addition to the definition of budget classifiers and gender programmatic categories. In 2018, the General Budget Directorate presented a guide and a series of procedures for gender-responsive budgeting in the different stages of the budget cycle, which were developed with support from UN Women and the European Union. They also designed a form for the classification of direct and indirect investments with a gender approach for the formulation of the 2019 budget, which also included the incorporation of the gender subfunction in the State’s Financial Management System.