Nepal's Gender-Responsive Budgeting — Nearly Two Decades of Budget Tagging, and Its Implementation Gap

Nepal introduced gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) in FY2007-08 to meet constitutional and international commitments (CEDAW, the Beijing Platform for Action, and later the SDGs). Each year, the Ministry of Finance classifies every budget line into one of three tiers based on the estimated share of spending that benefits women: directly gender-responsive, indirectly gender-responsive, or gender-neutral. A 2012 Ministry of Finance guideline formalised the scoring method, and the approach was later extended to provincial and local governments through a 2015 localisation strategy and 2020 model guidelines.
The directly gender-responsive share of the national budget rose from 11.03% in FY2007-08 to 40.25% in FY2022-23 — an almost four-fold increase over 15 years — and Nepal's Ministry of Finance reported over 40% of the roughly NPR 1.96 trillion FY2025-26 budget as gender-responsive in its climate-and-gender budget tagging report.
A 2026 study by Himal Innovative Development and Research with ActionAid International Nepal, Chitwan Active Women Foundation and Makwanpur Women Upliftment Society — covering FY2022-23 to FY2024-25 across the national Ministry of Women, Children, Gender and Sexual Minorities and Social Security and three municipalities — found the ministry classified 100% of its own budget as 'directly gender-responsive' for three straight years without applying the five-indicator scoring method; officials told researchers they instead picked 'direct' from a software dropdown. Over the same three years, the ministry spent only 41–56% of its allocated budget each year (for example, Rs 1.30 billion allocated versus Rs 650 million spent in FY2024-25), meaning a large share of funds nominally earmarked for gender equality went unused and reverted to the treasury.
Separate Kathmandu Post reporting (2022, 2024) documents a longer-running pattern of the same problem: GRB funds at the local level sometimes diverted to generic infrastructure such as roads and drainage, and limited official understanding of how the classification is supposed to work. The Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) programme has also conducted a dedicated Gender-Responsive Public Financial Management assessment of Nepal (2024).

Read the full analysis: https://kathmandupost.com/national/2026/05/31/how-nepal-s-gender-responsive-budget-fails-the-women-it-claims-to-serve