From Reporting to Reform? Assessing South Africa’s 2026 Gender Budget Statement
South Africa’s public budgets play a central role in shaping the inequalities that structure people’s lives. Access to employment, income, healthcare, education and public services remains deeply unequal, with the impacts often compounded by race, gender, class, disability, age and where people live.
Gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) is intended to ensure that public resources are used to address these inequalities. South Africa’s Gender Budget Statement (GBS) is an important accountability mechanism within this broader framework, providing an opportunity for government to assess how budgets respond to gender inequality and whether spending contributes to substantive equality.
This background paper assesses the 2026 Gender Budget Statement against this transformative objective. It compares the 2026 GBS with the inaugural 2025 statement, examining what has changed, where progress has been made and where important gaps remain.
The limits of reporting
The 2026 GBS represents an expansion of gender-responsive budgeting across government. The number of participating departments has increased from five in 2025 to twelve in 2026, while the statement introduces a new analytical pillar focused on Human Endowment, recognising the importance of investments in areas such as health, education and social protection.
However, the paper finds that this institutional expansion has not yet translated into a meaningful restructuring of fiscal priorities.
The GBS remains largely focused on reporting and tagging expenditure rather than demonstrating how budgets are being redesigned to address the structural causes of gender inequality. It primarily catalogues programmes and allocations benefiting women, without adequately explaining whether these interventions are changing unequal outcomes.
This risks reducing gender-responsive budgeting to a compliance exercise rather than using it as a tool to influence how public resources are allocated.
Looking beyond women’s economic empowerment
The 2026 GBS continues to place significant emphasis on Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE), particularly through employment, enterprise support, skills development and participation initiatives.
While these interventions are important, the paper argues that this framing is too narrow to address the structural conditions that shape women’s economic lives. Unpaid care work, unequal access to public services, gender-based violence, spatial inequality and other intersecting forms of exclusion receive insufficient attention.
A transformative approach must recognise that women do not experience inequality in the same way. Race, class, disability, age, sexual orientation, geography and employment status all shape access to income, opportunities and public services.
The paper therefore argues for gender-responsive budgeting that addresses the structural conditions producing inequality, rather than focusing primarily on programmes that are explicitly labelled as benefiting women.
From counting expenditure to changing outcomes
A central concern raised in the paper is the reliance on gender expenditure tagging as the primary tool for implementing gender-responsive budgeting.
Knowing how much government spends on programmes that benefit women does not, on its own, tell us whether that spending is reducing gender inequality. Public expenditure must be assessed in relation to the inequalities it is intended to address, the barriers it seeks to overcome and the outcomes it is expected to achieve.
The GBS should therefore provide clearer explanations of how interventions respond to specific gender gaps, alongside measurable outcomes, targets and indicators. Gender impact assessments and other analytical tools should complement expenditure tagging.
Towards transformative gender budgeting
The paper calls for the GBS to move from a supplementary reporting exercise towards a mechanism that actively shapes fiscal decision-making.
Key priorities include:
- requiring every government department to conduct sector-specific gender analysis;
- strengthening the use of gender analysis throughout government planning, budgeting, monitoring and evaluation;
- moving beyond expenditure tagging towards an assessment of how budgets address structural inequalities;
- developing clear outcomes, targets, timelines and performance indicators;
- integrating gender analysis into broader fiscal trade-offs, including decisions around fiscal consolidation and public services; and
- strengthening coordination between existing gender policy frameworks and the budget process.
The paper argues that gender-responsive budgeting should not be treated as a separate budget for women. Rather, it should ensure that public resources across government are designed and allocated in ways that dismantle structural inequalities.
From reporting to reform
The 2026 Gender Budget Statement provides an important foundation for strengthening gender-responsive budgeting in South Africa. But its potential will only be realised if gender analysis moves from the margins of the budget process into the decisions that determine how public resources are prioritised.
Moving from reporting to reform means asking not only who benefits from public spending, but whether public spending is changing the conditions that produce inequality in the first place.