ISLAMABAD (17 August 2026): Pakistan has made significant strides in Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) though it ranks last on gender parity globally, said experts at a session, which examined the country’s fiscal gender gaps, policy framework and implementation bottlenecks.
The session, organized by the Gender Working Group, was held at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) here.
In her keynote speech, Dr Fareeha Armughan, co-chair of the Gender Working Group and Head of Center for Evidence Action Research, SDPI said Pakistan is ahead of its time on gender responsive budgeting and, despite persistent stereotypes, is outperforming several Western countries in this area. She highlighted the contradiction at the heart of Pakistan’s position, i.e. women comprise 49.3 per cent of the population, yet the country ranked 148th out of 148 on the Global Gender Gap Index 2025. Pakistan has achieved 56.7 per cent parity across economic, educational, health and political indicators, she said.
She clarified that GRB is not a segregated budget for women but is built on three pillars such as gender analysis, responsive allocation and accountability and includes women’s participation in budget consultations. The approach draws legal backing from Articles 25, 34 and 37-A of the Constitution, alongside Pakistan’s national and international commitments on gender equality, she said.
Dr. Armughan identified six thematic pillars of GRB: gender-based violence, women’s economic empowerment, social protection, climate change, social services and policy design, anchored by the National Gender Policy Framework 2022. Institutional oversight includes a parliamentary caucus of women legislators and a parliamentary standing committee, though she cautioned that GRB-related data remains largely absent or unusable.
Presenting Pakistan’s fiscal gender gap, Dr. Armughan cited stark figures: women own just 1.5 to 2 per cent of agricultural land, while female labour force participation stands at 22.7 to 25 per cent. Gender budget statements show only 8 percent of PSDP allocations and 9 per cent of the current budget directed toward women. She said women spend roughly ten more hours than men on caregiving daily while remaining the least paid, contrasting this with Bangladesh, which has monetized unpaid caregiving work at an estimated $300 billion of GDP.
She said Pakistan’s budget classification system remains gender-neutral, rendering the impact of spending on women largely invisible, and that low representation of women in planning and finance ministries continues to limit gender-aware policy design. PSDP projects, she added, generally lack gender markers, and infrastructure is seldom designed with women’s safety and mobility in mind.
On the FY2026-27 budget, Armughan said social safety, education and infrastructure received the largest share of women-focused spending. She cited a female literacy rate of 54 percent against 73 percent for males, and noted the government had removed taxes on women’s hygiene products. She called for building an ecosystem of mentoring and institutional networks, alongside fiscal support for incubation, financial literacy and capacity-building through gender-sensitive fiscal and regulatory measures.
Dr. Kashif Majeed Salik, Research Fellow, SDPI, drawing on his doctoral research on migration, said empirical evidence shows women who earn income spend proportionally more on their families than men do, a pattern most pronounced among migrant women workers. He argued this establishes a clear policy rationale that investing in women’s economic empowerment directly strengthens family welfare.
Salik also pointed to generational differences in women’s agency within Pakistani households, noting that older women tend to gain greater autonomy with age, while younger women including daughters and daughters-in-law face greater constraints on self-expression, a pattern he said holds even among educated segments of society, in Pakistan and elsewhere. He proposed that the working group build a gender lens into SDPI’s ongoing research portfolio and flag findings that may reflect externally driven narratives rather than local realities.
During the question-and-answer session, Dr. Armughan detailed why policy design often fails at the implementation stage, citing fragmented delivery systems and weak local government capacity that distort interventions between federal design and the ground level. She shared field observations from an interior village in Tharparkar, Sindh, where women spend roughly four hours daily traveling to collect water — a burden she said is routinely missed by policymakers focused on visible spending over time-poverty and unpaid care work.
She argued that raising female labour force participation requires investment in care infrastructure, noting that the “Uraan Pakistan” framework sets numeric participation targets without specifying an implementation pathway.
Armughan also said Pakistan’s political economy favours visible, tangible investments — infrastructure, social protection — over less visible outcomes such as education quality, producing a mismatch between high enrollment figures and weak learning outcomes. As long as political economy considerations override social sector spending decisions, she said, development outcomes will remain compromised.
She cited Pakistan’s 25th Constitutional Amendment and earlier engagement with German federal and parliamentary counterparts on gender-sensitive policymaking as examples of sustained institutional advocacy, noting that women continue to lead much of this work despite limited resources.
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