“We need relevant policies in place and also to implement them! We need to make sure that unpaid care work loses its female face, so women have more space to advance to and take on leadership roles in public finance. We must ensure better work-life balance, flexible work arrangement and build a pipeline of young women leaders such as in the IDI SAI Young Leaders Initiative. And we must take the diverse realities of women into account.”
These were just a couple of messages that we heard in a high-level event on “Advancing women’s leadership in Public Finance Management” on 17 March 2021. Around 400 participants took part in the lively discussions on the side lines of the 65th United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. The event was jointly organised by IDI, the International Budget Partnership and UN Women, and built on a previous workshop series in 2020.
Representing her own institution and the SAI world more generally, Marta Acosta, General Comptroller of Costa Rica, shared her experience together with four other fantastic women leaders from civil society and ministries of finance.
Current data still tells a bleak story. In 2020, only 25 of 190 finance ministers were women and less than a third of all heads of national supreme audit institutions were women. Marta Acosta is one of them. Together with her co-participants she looked at ways to enhance women’s leadership in public finance and spoke about the role supreme audit institutions can play.
IDI will continue to support supreme audit institutions in developing countries to support SAIs in becoming gender-responsive organisations and in conducting audits that contribute to gender equality. See also IDI’s new Gender Strategy.
SPEAKERS in the event:
Marta Acosta Zúñiga, Auditor General, Costa Rica
Beena Pallical, General Secretary, Dalit Arthik Adhikar Andolan, India
Zineb Bouba, Head of the Unit for Economic and Financial Reporting and Gender Budget Reporting,
Department of Financial Studies and Forecasting, Ministry of Economy, Finance and Administrative
Reform, Kingdom of Morocco
Rehemah Namutebi, Director General of National Budget, Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, Republic of Rwanda
Moderator: Malado Kaba, Board Member, International Budget Partnership and former Minister of Finance, Guinea