Sierra Leone's Gender Budget Statement — Piloting Gender-Responsive Budgeting Across Government

Since fiscal year 2024, Sierra Leone's Ministry of Finance has published an annual Gender Budget Statement alongside the national budget, piloting Gender-Responsive Budgeting (GRB) in five ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs): Gender and Children's Affairs, Basic and Senior Secondary Education, Health, Defence and the Sierra Leone Police. The pilot is anchored in the Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment (GEWE) Act, 2023, and is supported technically by UN Women's regional GRB programme.
By the FY2026 budget cycle the pilot had expanded to ten MDAs, adding Correctional Services, Agriculture and Food Security, the National Commission for Social Action, Tertiary and Higher Education, and Environment and Climate Change. The IMF's 2024 Article IV consultation for Sierra Leone explicitly recommended continuing the gender-budgeting rollout, citing UNDP estimates that structural barriers to women's land, property and finance access cost the economy roughly US$25 million a year in foregone revenue.
Independent Sierra Leonean reporting is more cautious: a Politico SL analysis found that flagship programmes such as the 'Feed Salone' agriculture initiative still carry no gender-disaggregated targets, and that the National Development Plan lacks a dedicated budget line for women and girls — describing gender budgeting as 'the missing link' rather than a mainstreamed practice. No independent evaluation of whether the tagged budget lines have changed actual ministry spending or outcomes has yet been published; this entry should be read as evidence of institutional design and expansion, not of measured impact.

Read the full analysis: https://www.politicosl.com/articles/gender-budgeting-missing-link-sierra-leone-women%E2%80%99s-growth-agenda