WRI held a multi-stakeholder training for budget monitoring at the local level. The training was held in five WRI’s research areas, which are Gianyar regency (October 21-24, 2004), Banda Aceh Municipality (December 16-19, 2004), Pontianak Municipality (December 27-29, 2004), Manado Municipality (January 24-26, 2005), and Kupang Municipality (February 2-4, 2005).

 

In general this training is aimed to increase the ability of civil society organizations (CSOs) and the government as well to draw up a budget that is more pro-poor and pro-marginalized groups, including women.

 

In specific the aims of the training are :

1. To identify problems that result from the implementation of non gender-considerate budget, that can be presented to regional government to draw up a budget with that takes into account gender perspectives.

2. To analyze the implementation of non gender-sensitive budget in the researched regions.

3. To identify work partners at regional government level to press the implementation of gender-sensitive budget.

 

This training covered 5 stages :

1. First stage, to identify the level of conceptual understanding, gender-perspective understanding, and how to analyze it.

2. Second stage, to employ FGDs and plenary sessions to identify and to map out gender issues.

3. Third stage, to discuss a gender budget.

4. Fourth stage, to audit the Document of Work Item Budget (DASK) through FGDs and plenary sessions with Bandung municipality as the study case.

5. The fifth stage, to draw up a gender-just performance-based budget through FGDs and plenary sessions and to design follow-up actions after the training.

 

For Gianyar regency, Pontianak municipality and Banda Aceh municipality, the third and fifth stages did not take place. This is because the in-depth explanation on gender could not comply with local understanding. The dominance of socio-cultural values, religious interpretation and the government bureaucracy that was not sensitive to gender-just perspective had become the handicaps for the explanation.

 

Training Process

As anticipated, when the preparation for Multistakeholder training was underway in 9 researched districts, in the first facilitation during the training process of gender understanding, participants, especially males rejected all matters pertaining to gender and gender relations. They identified gender with female. This condition had resulted in the fact that facilitation process for participants in Gianyar regency, Pontianak municipality and Banda Aceh municipality, covered only the first two stages as already said before.

 

Regional government (the executive) and the legislative body – as already happened in preliminary Multistakeholder training in 9 researched districts – kept insisting that budget allocations that had been made and approved were gender-just, taking into consideration people’s aspirations and women’s as well. But when probed further, in facilitation process, its implementation was not aimed at women’s participation, either in the planning, discussions, or in budget implementation. Even an already gender budget as revealed by the executives turned out to be incongruent with the appropriate gender concept. Only in FGDs and plenary sessions did the participants become open-minded to gender understanding and found their faults in doing gender-just allocations.

 

In every facilitation and group discussion, Women Research Institute (WRI) explored deeper unique and specific local issues of each district. Characteristics of local issues were reflected in follow-up plans of each region.

 

Gianyar regency will do socialization of gender and gender budget to all parties. In the meantime Banda Aceh municipality will improve and file separated data and do socialization of gender to all parties. Pontianak municipality will establish a Multistakeholder forum for gender budget facilitated by Regional Development Plan Body (Bappeda) of Pontianak municipality. Manado municipality will do socialization of gender budget and gender-related trafficking after the issuance of Regional Anti-trafficking regulation. Kupang municipality through Women Empowerment Office will assist gender budget, especially in relation to domestic violence and rape cases in Kupang municipality.

 

Participants’ Contribution

Both in the training preparation in 9 researched districts and in the training of gender budget, the participants showed their full participation and gave contributions to the implementation of training programs. This is because the issue of gender budget was a new issue and became the need of the regional government. Some of local policy makers have not been socialized with gender budget through the Decree of Minister of Home Affairs No.132/2003, while some others have been familiar with. Nevertheless, since their understanding was not that good, gender-just programs and its budget allocations were not in accordance with the aims and people’s needs, both males and females, where women always became the marginalized group. Accordingly, it was found that there were many policies that were not gender-responsive.

 

The gender-just budget training that involved multi-parties, gave many lessons for every participant such as knowledge and information on gender concepts, budget planning mechanism, the involved actors and the time needed to draw up a budget, discussions, implementation and audit of budget. In addition to that also presented were the problems and policies that were not gender-just, and aspirations from the grassroots, including those of women. The most important thing is the knowledge of the Decree of Minister of Home Affairs No.132/2003 on the general guidelines of gender mainstreaming implementation in regional development. The policy makers did not know of this decree before of little socialization.

 

This activity became a collaboration forum and multi-party sharing of experience to understand the process and budget designing mechanism. This activity had also become a collective responsibility to realize gender equality and justice, and to handle difficulties they have been facing in implementing the gender budget.

 

Participants

Participants in this training consisted of various elements such as Regional House of Representatives (DPRD) of C Commission or Budget Commission, E Commission, female DPRD members from any commission, the executive, namely head of Regional Development Plan Body (Bappeda), heads of sub-division of budget for Educational Sector, Health Sector, and Labor Force Sector, head of People Empowerment Office, head of Women Empowerment Bureau and head of sub-division of Socio-cultural Affairs, as well as elements of civil society that comprised Anticorruption NGOs, female NGOs, local partner NGOs, Social Organizations and Family Welfare Education Group (PKK).***