Contested Visions of and Routes to Gender Equality and Governance: Budgeting for the Gender Sector under International Tutelage in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone

Abstract

The overall goal of Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB), especially in post-conflict African countries, is to enhance and uphold the mainstreaming of gender-aware, people-centric nationally-driven policies into the calculations of the expenditures, and disbursement of government (national and local) funds for the implementation of all socio-economic and political development programmes. In other words, national and sub-national budgets are an outcome of political decisions "about how and who levies state revenue as well as for which purposes and for whom expenditures are disbursed." 1They represent the gendered power relationships within a country.2 It is about "the value of a country: who it values, whose work it values and who it rewards ...and who and what work it does." 3GRB is a politically-induced phenomenon that has become very popular especially after the release or the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 200l to change the budgetary processes and their corresponding intervention outcome policies, with the aim of promoting a pro-peace gender-equal society, and as well as contributing to the stabilization of societal, albeit domestic, gender relations.