Paper/Proposal Title

Exploring Gender Budgeting to Accelerate the Realisation of Women’s Rights in Nigeria

Presenter/Author Information

Eno EkpoFollow

Location

M2380

Start Date

November 2023

End Date

November 2023

Keywords

Gender budgeting, human rights, gender equality, African feminism

Abstract

The proliferation of gender budgeting initiatives globally has yielded a progressive understanding of the distributive impacts of responsive gender budgeting to ensure that both women and men benefit equally from public resources for inclusive development. The incorporation of providing resources in international human rights frameworks recognises the relevance of resources to drive development policies and programmes aimed at rectifying gender imbalances that disproportionately affect women and mandates the adoption of gender budgeting as a necessary step by states to translate their commitments to realising women’s rights at domestic levels. The Maputo Protocol, a pioneering African human rights instrument with extensive protections for women, engenders prospects for states to provide budgetary resources to realise women’s rights. South Africa exemplifies adopted gender budgeting initiatives that underscore women’s rights obligations and the state’s duty to fulfil through budgetary resource allocation.

Nigeria is yet to adopt gender budgeting as a means to meet its commitment of providing resources for women given the lack of country-specific gender budgeting initiative. There is a need to analyse Nigeria’s budgeting priorities to form the basis of potential gender budgeting initiatives. The paper aims to explore Nigeria’s national development strategy to determine gender budgeting adoption and considers whether adherence is likely to be mandatory (prescriptive) or voluntary (self-regulatory), thereby requiring a middle ground approach. It draws from African Feminist scholarship as a theoretical framework which suggests the interrelatedness between women’s rights realisation and resource allocation to redress women’s disadvantages as a holistic driver of gender equality and inclusion for sustainable development.

This paper concludes that fulfilling Nigeria’s obligation to women demands a contextualised gender budgeting initiative that translates state commitments into action through adopting a gender perspective in budgeting processes that meets the evolving challenges women grapple with in the country.

Author/Speaker Biographical Statement(s)

Eno Ekpo is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Essex, United Kingdom. Her research interest is on human rights, with focus on socio-economic rights and the advancement of women and minority rights. She is also particularly interested in the intersection between gender responsive budgeting and the realisation of inclusive development. Ms. Ekpo has cross-cutting development practice experience having worked within the government as Senior Investigation Officer at the National Human Rights Commission of Nigeria and as Programs Manager for Gender Mobile Initiative, a non-governmental organisation in the global south. She has significant experience in human rights advocacy and contributes through strategic programming to advance the rights of vulnerable groups, in particular women and girls. Eno Ekpo holds a bachelor’s degree in Sociology and is an alumna of the Human Rights and Democratization in Africa master’s program of the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her PhD. in Human Rights focuses on the role of gender budgeting to provide adequate budgetary resources for women economic empowerment in Nigeria. Ms. Ekpo is passionate about gender justice and understands the importance of promoting socio-economic empowerment for women to enhance gender equality, inclusive and sustainable development.