Nurfika Osman – The State Ministry for Women's Empowerment and Child Protection has successfully pushed seven ministries to implement a gender-responsive budget system, a tool to achieve gender equality and fairness by balancing the interests of both sexes, an official said on Tuesday.

"This budgeting policy will impact and be beneficial to both genders in 2010," said Sri Danti, the state ministry's head of gender mainstreaming. "It does not mean that the budget is going to be divided into 50 percent for women and 50 percent for men. It is aimed at addressing women's and men's needs."

Danti said the system was designed to mainstream gender dimension into all stages of budget cycles. She said the policy was introduced because Indonesia has a non-gender system, or, as she calls it, "a homogenous budget system that is not effective in addressing the needs of both genders."

"The policy refers to the process of planning, approving, executing, monitoring, analyzing and auditing budgets in a gender-sensitive way so that both genders benefit," Danti said. She added that the policy would help decide how strategies should be made, adjusted and prioritized.

She said gender-responsive budgets would tend to be more beneficial to women because they were still socially marginalized under the patriarchal system.

"For example, we will have a special budget to help give girls the same opportunity to go to school as boys," she said, adding that the rate of illiteracy among girls in the country stands at 5.4 percent with boys at 2.7 percent.

Danti also mentioned special budgets in the Health Ministry aimed at reducing the number of mothers dying during childbirth.

She said, however, that for the time being there were no sanctions for ministries that failed to implement the policy. "So far we have not decided on what the sanctions will be, but in the future we will."

Danti said the seven ministries were those for women's empowerment and child protection, national education, finance, public works, agriculture, health and the National Development Planning Board (Bappenas). All other ministries are expected to join the program in 2011.