Ecuador

Ecuador's Gender Responsive Budgeting Experience

Since 2005, the Ministry of Finance has been working to incorporate the Gender Approach in the State’s General Budget with the support and technical assistance of development cooperation organizations such as UN Women (formerly UNIFEM) and the German Technical Cooperation, among others. These efforts resulted in the provision of training and the specialization of the team of the National Fiscal Equity Directorate of the Ministry of Finance (formerly the Gender Equity Directorate), in addition to training courses and awareness-raising processes for the inclusion of the gender perspective in the State’s General Budget.

 

The specialized training of government officials in this field, which took place in 2008, resulted in the development of key tools such as the K Function Catalogue – “Gender Equity”, the Classifier for the Orientation of Expenditure on Equalities and the Budgeting Guidelines with a Gender Perspective for use during the process of formulation of the State’s General Budget. The Function K Catalogue – “Gender Equality” was incorporated in 2010 by the Ministry of Finance to facilitate the registration and quantification of resources allocated by the entities of the State’s General Budget to reduce gender gaps.

Two years later, in 2012, the Ministry decided to replace it with the Classifier for the Orientation of Expenditure on Gender Equality Policies. That Classifier has now been institutionalized and its application is mandatory, considering it makes it possible to link the activities of programmes covered by budgets to the strategic goals and objectives of global planning processes and public policies and, in particular, to the national women’s and gender equality agenda. The classifier also makes it possible to verify the extent to which they are being incorporated into the budget and simplifies the follow-up on budget execution.

Bibliographic resources