Harare — FEMALE legislators should be equipped with requisite skills and knowledge to carry out a gender analysis and monitoring of the national budget so that they make informed contributions towards the budget formulation, a national workshop on gender budget, analysis and monitoring resolved yesterday.

The workshop also said women legislators should be in a position to craft and present motions in Parliament and also take the lead and support one another in debating issues related to gender development.

Delegates to the two-day workshop on gender budget analysis and monitoring organised by the Southern African Parliamentary Support Trust, also noted that women legislators needed enough information and capacity to engage treasury on the amount of funds they required for their ministries.

SAPST executive director, Mr John Makamure said the workshop was also to launch guidelines and toolkits for budget analysis and monitoring that would ensure that women legislators are able to discuss constitutional-making process.

The participants felt women, from legislators to those at grassroots level were not being involved in the budget formulation process resulting in crucial ministries being awarded insufficient funds, which were in most cases delayed without any explanation.

This usually resulted in the affected ministries failing to execute their duties properly.

However given the necessary monitoring skills, women will be able to stand for their rights and make meaningful contributions to the budget.

Officially opening the workshop, President of the Senate, Mrs Edna Madzongwe said gender budget was about investing for the future of the nation.

Gender responsive budgeting she said was the most important policy initiative that a government could implement to show its commitment to the ideals of gender equality to fulfil specific goals and priorities. "Zimbabwe is fully committed to promoting the participation of women in government decision making.

"The National Gender Policy and the Ministry of Women Affairs Gender and Community Development are some of the strategic regulatory framework and institutional arrangements put in place by the Government to achieve gender equality and women advancement," said Mrs Madzongwe.

She said all legislators particularly women parliamentarians should be gender budgeting literate.

A growing body of evidence confirms that the inclusion of women's perspectives into various economic activities results in greater equality between men and women. "When this happens, economies tend to grow faster.

"The poor who are the majority are women and become economically empowered and the well being of men, women and children is greatly enhanced," said Mrs Madzongwe.

She said a lot of work still needed to be done.