The Female Budget?

Finance Minister Trevor Manuel on Monday warned that women's issues cannot be carved out and separately analysed for budget purposes, for planning purposes or for monitoring and reporting purposes from the broader development challenges the country faces.

In particular, he reckoned that it would be wrong to provide separate funding for women's retirement pensions.

He told the meeting as he was giving keynote address at the South African Women in Dialogue Forum that for some people involved in the Women's Budget Initiative it has perhaps been a source of disappointment that the treasury does not yet have a women's budget division, and our publications do not include an annual women's budget report, or children's report, or disability report.

The agenda

"But it would clearly be wrong to create ... separate budgeting processes and allocations, for activities and services that are inextricably bound up with the whole of our social and economic development agenda," he said.

"It is far better to focus on strengthening voice and accountability, within the mainstream of the budget process, and in each and every area of public planning and service delivery in which there are either special needs or shared concerns that should be brought into consideration."

Manuel pointed out that income support for poor households is more likely to be spent on meeting basic household needs if it is controlled by women. "And so it turns out that the expansion of the child support grant," he said "which mainly goes to mothers or women as caregivers, and has been the fastest-growing part of our social security system, has been a highly effective and well-targeted poverty reduction programme, focused also on our constitutional obligation to give priority to meeting the needs of children.

Intergenerational benefits

He said that the education of women has strong further intergenerational human development benefits - in both the educational attainment of their children and in health, nutrition and family welfare. So there is a positive link between the achievement of gender equality in schooling and these broader development goals.

"We know that improved health and sanitation, and better care of children, depend on reducing the burden on poor women associated with inadequate water, housing and transport services," he said.

He also argued that in social security reform, the longer life expectancy of women would act as a disadvantage in trying to deal with women's needs separately. "Funded and priced separately, and informed by appropriate actuarial considerations, an annuity purchased at the age of 65 yields a considerably lower income for a woman in retirement than for a man," he said. "Our social security reform project offers the opportunity to construct a shared basic retirement savings arrangement in which annuitisation is priced at a common rate for the community as a whole, for men and for women.

"Retirement savings is an area of policy in which the particular needs of women need to be properly analysed and articulated, but it turns out that separate funding arrangements are unlikely to be the most appropriate way of meeting these needs."