Experts demand work plan, budget allocation to eliminate gender disparity

GBNEWS24 DESK//

Gender experts demanded implementation of the policy for women empowerment and elimination of existing gender discrimination through formulating specific work plan and budget allocation and giving special focus on women’s development programme.

The demand came from a post budget virtual press conference organised by Bangladesh Mohila Parishad on Wednesday.

The experts also noted that assistance for slum women should be provided under the social security programme with the help of public representatives.

They called upon the Women and Children Affairs Ministry and Education Ministry to work in a more coordinated manner to reduce the drop school out rate of girls, preventing child marriage and various forms of sexual violence against women and children.

Referring to different research works, the experts also said that a big number of women who used to work as a domestic help has lost their jobs, and government has not yet implement its promise to help this vulnerable group.

Jahangirnagar University’s Economics dept Professor Sharmind Nilormi, also a member of the organisation’s Central Committee, read out a written statement at the press conference.

Dhaka University Economics dept Professor Saima Haque Bidisha, Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies ( BIDS) Senior Research Fellow Nazneen Ahmed and General Secretary Maleka Banu participated as a discussants.

Expressing their concerns over the non-submission of gender budget report for the fiscal 2019-2020 and 2020-21, they said that government’s such act made them surprised.

Prof Sharmind Nilormi briefly discussed the gender budget and said that the gender budget has not been published last year due to Covid pandemic. And this year too they did not receive any gender budget, she said.

“Therefore, it is not possible to know what benefits will be available from the projects for women,” she said demanding the release of the gender budget during the final release of the proposed budget.

Dhaka University Professor of Economics, Saima Haque Bidisha said, the imposition of tax on e-commerce, mobile banking based services will have a negative impact on women entrepreneurs working from home.

She suggested gender decentralization data collection, creating gender sensitive structures in monitoring and evaluation to make gender budget effective.