How gender-responsive budgeting in South Africa can combat entrenched inequality

Gender-responsive budgeting – or GRB in government and policy circles – is an essential tool for achieving a truly equitable society. At its best, GRB goes far beyond superficial allocations to so-called women’s programmes. It fundamentally shapes how governments raise revenue, allocate resources and spend public money, ensuring that every fiscal decision actively works to dismantle the systemic inequalities that women face.

Although more than 100 countries have adopted gender-responsive budgeting frameworks, South Africa’s efforts have lain dormant for years. Quietly released amid the political noise of three separate Budgets in 2025, the Gender Budget Statement (GBS) was a potentially significant step forward. But in its current form it risks remaining a supplementary, symbolic document, with little meaningful analysis of how the national Budget advances or undermines gender equity.

The biggest concern is that the GBS 2025 relies heavily on gender expenditure tagging – a method of labelling spending based on its intended gender impact. While this approach can be a useful first step in identifying programmes that explicitly target women, men or children, it falls short of capturing how broader budget decisions affect gender equity. Women’s rights groups and gender budget analysts have long warned that tagging is far less effective in revealing the deeper, structural inequalities embedded in general government spending. The more transformative task lies in tracing how allocations across all sectors – including those not explicitly gendered, such as infrastructure, housing or transport – shape women’s outcomes and lived experiences.

We see this limitation clearly in the current framework, where “tracking” focuses primarily on programmes explicitly earmarked for women. While these initiatives have value, they often reach women who are already positioned to access higher education or formal markets.

The GBS cannot be limited to tracking targeted programmes or gender-tagged allocations. To be meaningful, it must become a strategic tool – a point of leverage to examine how the entire budget either reinforces or disrupts the socioeconomic conditions that hold women back. What remains unexamined are the deeper, everyday barriers that prevent many women – especially those in marginalised or rural communities – from participating in these spaces at all.

As feminist economist Naila Kabeer reminds us, women’s economic empowerment is not simply about expanding access to markets or increasing educational attainment. It is about expanding the capacity to make meaningful, strategic choices in all areas of life. This requires confronting the structural inequalities that shape both paid and unpaid labour: the disproportionate burden of care, the uneven access to public services and the lack of resources that keep many women on the margins.

Yet the current GBS framework offers little insight into how these underlying conditions are shaped by public spending. For example, while it may report on allocations to increase women’s participation in higher education, it tells us nothing about whether investments in water, sanitation or transport are actually enabling women to seize those opportunities.

There are 17 million people in South Africa who are characterised as “not economically active”, but this does not mean that they do not work. There are countless people driving South Africa’s economy – whether through formal jobs, informal work or unpaid and underpaid care work. From the moment you wake up you engage in the labour that keeps this country going: teaching, healing, caregiving, selling, providing – or simply surviving. Often, women are disproportionately represented in doing the necessary work that sustains us all. Yet when the National Budget is tabled, women’s needs and challenges are rarely front and centre. Fortunately the tools to change this already exist.

The real barriers facing women

Gender inequality manifests in countless everyday ways. In the second quarter of 2025, Statistics South Africa reported that more than 2.1 million women cited “homemaker” as their reason for not participating in the labour force, compared with just 280,000 men. That’s more than eight women for every man. While homemaking can be a meaningful choice for some, in South Africa it is often not a matter of free, personal decisions. It is a consequence of structural exclusion: the lack of affordable childcare, safe transport, reliable water and sanitation, and the public support systems that would enable women to participate in paid work.

Another way gender inequality manifests is when grandmothers are left to care for children with little income or state support. These are not isolated incidents, they are the outcomes of policy failure. When women walk long distances to fetch water, or are forced to decline informal work because no one can care for their dependants, it is a direct result of budget decisions that overlook the unpaid economy and ignore the social conditions that constrain women’s choices.

To be meaningful, future iterations of South Africa’s Gender Budget Statement must go further. Drawing on international best practices – such as Uganda – it should require every government department to include a comprehensive gender situational analysis. This must begin with a clear socioeconomic profile of women, girls and gender-diverse individuals, and assess how fiscal decisions – from spending cuts in education, to VAT and fuel levy increases – disproportionately affect the most marginalised.

It is especially telling that, despite three separate Budgets tabled in 2025, the Gender Budget Statement remained unchanged. This confirms what many have suspected: that the GBS is not yet a dynamic tool linked to actual fiscal decision-making – but it could be.

A budget that works for women is a budget that works for communities. This is not aspirational, it is essential. If the National Budget is to power sustainable development, social cohesion and truly inclusive growth, then gender-responsive budgeting must be treated as a transformative instrument – not just in rhetoric, but in how we collect data, allocate resources and design interventions. DM

Juhi Kasan, Kirsten Pearson, Lisa Higginson, Thokozile Madonko, Aliya Chikte and Matshidiso Lencoasa are members of the Budget Justice Coalition, which advocates for a budget that is developed by the people for the people.