Has Malaysia's gender responsiveness fallen behind?

Screenshot of the Gender Budgeting manual that was developed for the pilot project.

In Malaysia, a GRB initiative was introduced back in 2003 under then prime minister Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi who had instructed the Women, Family and Community Development Ministry to oversee it with technical and financial assistance provided by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). It began with a pilot project in five ministries (Education and Higher Education, Health, Human Resources, and Rural Development) that were supposed to test and refine the approach and format of gender budgeting in Malaysia. The pilot also included the development of a manual on Gender Budgeting in Malaysia.

Its aim was “to test and develop a proven, workable format for gender budgeting that could be applied to the rest of the government”, according to the manual published by the Women’s Ministry in 2005 (https://shorturl.at/auJ59).