Tunisia’s budget reform targets women and children

Genesis was hired to provide technical assistance to Tunisia’s Ministry of Finance in incorporating gender- and child-sensitive classifications into their budgeting process.

Inspired by Genesis and UNICEF’s gender- and child-sensitive budget briefs and reports developed in 2022, the Ministry of Finance was motivated to transform the historic tagging of budgets into an automated system that is intrinsically part of their budget process.

Since 2021, the ministry has implemented reforms towards Objective-Based Budgeting, leading to reflections across government ministries on how to make their budgeting process more transparent. The recent reforms are opening the doors for new, transversal ways of examining government expenditure.

Gender- and child-sensitive budgeting ensures that the interests of women and children are considered throughout the entire budget cycle, moving beyond traditional one-time analyses. At every stage of the budgeting process, the impact of expenditures on women and children is carefully evaluated.

To achieve this, we developed comprehensive methods for identifying, classifying and quantifying spending that directly benefits women and children. With these tools, stakeholders can accurately assess the alignment of political commitments with budget allocations, ultimately promoting the achievement of their objectives.

Our categorisation system drew from international best practices but was adapted to the Tunisian context. The system was piloted in seven ministries and feedback from these enabled us to refine and improve it.

These codes are in the process of being embedded within the Ministry of Finance's information management system, led by the IT department. This integration will simplify future analyses, making it straightforward for ministries to extract the necessary data.

The new classification system facilitates cross-cutting analyses that are not dependent on a budget structure. The analyses can extract spending irrespective of the programme or the ministry where a line of expenditure resides.

• Project published on the joint SDG fund’s page
• Project published on UNICEF’s site
• Documentation published on the Ministry of Finance website
• Final report on the Ministry of Finance website