Provincial Gender Equality/Women’s Empowerment Policies and Gender-Responsive Budgeting

Building on its strong partnerships as well as previous work done in this area, UN Women Pakistan supported the provincial Women Development Departments in all 4 provinces to develop implementation plans for their Gender Equality & Women’s Empowerment Policies. These policies had previously been developed with support from UN Women, but needed detailed implementation plans and strategies to make them actionable. 

The Policies were updated and Implementation Frameworks were finalized in 2020 through participatory and inclusive processes including a series of consultations with government officials from various departments in order to ensure ownership across the functions and tiers of the provincial government. Other stakeholders and experts were also engaged to provide their valuable inputs. These documents set out the provincial governments’ vision, mission, policy objectives and recommended actions, to advance the gender equality agenda in their respective province , pursuant to the Government’s constitutional obligations and international commitments.

In Punjab and KP, UN Women took a step further to effectively get gender indicators incorporated in the provincial plans by developing a set of Gender-Responsive Planning and Budgeting (GRPB) Guidelines. The Labour and Human Resource Department, Government of Punjab and Labour Department, Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have both endorsed, adapted and notified these Guidelines to ensure that the processes for planning (of projects and schemes) and budgeting (of the finalized projects and schemes) are gender-responsive with regard to the Annual Development Programme (ADP). It was no minor achievement that the guidelines were endorsed and notified by government departments at the right point of time in the budget cycle of 2020.