Part III Assessing resources 10.5. DETERMINING PRIORITY GROUPS To uncover discriminatory patterns of allocations, the budget must also be evaluated in terms of how it distributes benefits among households and individuals. Ideally, budget figures should show per capita allocations, disaggregated by social groups. However, they rarely do. That said, it is still possible to infer who is benefiting from budgetary allocations (this is also referred to as the benefit “incidence” of the budget) by looking at the classification of budget lines. For example, if allocations in the urban sanitation sector currently prioritize and subsidize waterborne sanitation (i.e. sewerage pipes), poor households in informal settlements would not benefit from this budget allocation, as they mainly rely on on-site sanitation (e.g. pit latrines). Or, for example, you may be able to identify that budget lines for services that women tend to rely more on – e.g. anti-domestic violence programs, or childcare subsidies – have been cut or are comparatively under-resourced. When determining benefit incidence, it might also be relevant to calculate per capita spending; for example, by region or municipality. You can do this simply by dividing the total allocation to the region or municipality by the total population of that region (or by the total population group that you are interested in (e.g. school-aged children or women of reproductive age). GENDER BUDGETING is a particular type of budget analysis used to assess the differential impact of government revenue and expenditure on women, men, girls and boys. Gender budgeting facilitates greater accuracy and sustainability because available funds are more precisely tailored to the real needs of the different social groups. For example, in the area of health, men and women will have similar needs in respect to influenza and malaria. However, women will have greater needs than men in terms of reproductive health. Gender budgeting is a way to visualize and address the discriminatory effects of resource decisions. It should be noted that gender budgeting is a relatively new concept. As a result, the tools and techniques used to apply the theory are still evolving. Nevertheless, there are a number of helpful resources available at: www.gender-budgets.org. Many countries in the Asia Pacific region have incorporated gender-responsive budgeting in their national budget process, to some degree, although mostly without involvement from NHRIs. In the Philippines, the Philippine Commission on Women (PCW, formerly the NCRFW) works to enforce national legislation on the Gender and Development (GAD) Budget. To that end, the PCW provides training, advisory services, and written guidelines to government agencies, which are each required to produce annual GAD budgets and reports. The guidelines provide instructions for setting GAD objectives, targets, and performance indicators, and for costing GAD activities, to ensure proper budget allocations and the most efficient use of resources. In 2012, NHRIs adopted the Amman Program of Action at the Eleventh International Conference of the International Coordinating Committee of National Institutions for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights. The Amman Declaration included a commitment to: Support efforts to analyse whether States are spending the maximum of available resources on the progressive realization of women’s economic, social and cultural rights through encouraging government use of a gender perspective in their planning processes, and human rights and gender budgeting tools. NHRIs should share their findings with parliaments as a contribution to decision-making on budgeting and promote the use of human rights budgeting and gender budgeting tools by parliaments (paragraph 7). Chapter 10: Analysing public budgets | 107