In late 2023, I was invited by a parliamentary committee to analyze Somalia's federal budget through a gender lens. It was the first time such an analysis had been attempted at the federal level. What we found changed how I think about public finance.
The Method
Gender-responsive budget analysis is not about creating a separate "women's budget." It is about asking three questions of every expenditure:
- Who benefits? (beneficiary incidence)
- Who carries the burden? (time and labor costs)
- Who decides? (participation and voice)
We applied this framework to the 2024 federal budget, line by line, across twelve ministries.
The Findings
The headline was stark: only 3.2% of the federal budget was explicitly directed toward programs that primarily benefit women and girls. But the more interesting finding was in the implicit gender bias of supposedly neutral programs.
The Ministry of Agriculture's irrigation subsidy, for example, was designed for landholders. In Somalia, women hold less than 5% of registered land titles. The subsidy was therefore effectively a transfer to men, even though women perform the majority of agricultural labor.
Similarly, the Ministry of Health's budget for maternal health clinics was classified as "women-specific," while the budget for general hospitals — which primarily serve male patients due to mobility and cultural barriers — was classified as "gender-neutral."
The Politics of Classification
What struck me most was how much of the analysis depended on classification. The same expenditure could be read as gender-neutral or gender-biased depending on how you framed it. This is not a technical problem. It is a political one.
Bureaucrats resisted reclassification because it would reveal the gender imbalance of their programs. Ministers worried that a low "gender score" would embarrass them in parliament. And women's rights organizations debated whether to push for separate women's budgets or to demand gender mainstreaming across all programs.
The Outcome
The analysis was adopted by the parliamentary finance committee and cited in the 2024 budget debate. Several ministries agreed to pilot gender-disaggregated beneficiary tracking. And the Ministry of Planning committed to requiring gender analysis in all future budget proposals.
It is a small step. But budgets are where policy becomes real. If we can change how money is counted, we can change how it is spent.