Beyond the Budget: Turning Public Spending into Results for Women in Morocco

Public policies and spending can affect women and men differently. How governments allocate resources; who benefits from public services; and what needs remain unaddressed can actually reinforce or reduce existing gender gaps. In the transportation sector, for example, differences in access, safety, and service availability can shape women’s mobility, and their ability to access education, services, and jobs. This is where gender budgeting comes in. Gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) does not mean governments require a separate budget for women. Rather, it is a framework for integrating a gender perspective into existing public financial management processes, using analytical tools and gender-sensitive objectives and indicators to inform planning, resource allocation, implementation, and monitoring. Its broader objective is to align public spending and policies more effectively with gender equality goals, while strengthening transparency and accountability. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to GRB: different countries have developed different institutional arrangements and tools depending on their public financial management systems and policy priorities. Morocco is considered a GRB pioneer in the Middle East and North Africa region, having developed gender budgeting since the early 2000s. Over time, Morocco has moved from introducing the concept to building it into the architecture of public financial management. A landmark step came with the 2015 reform of the Organic Finance Law, which made GRB an integral part of the budget process across ministries. The Center of Excellence for Gender-Sensitive Budgeting (CE-BSG), anchored within the Ministry of Economy and Finance, plays a central role in translating this framework into practice, by conducting gender sector analyses, strengthening capacities across government, and producing the annual Gender Budget Report, which now tracks gender-sensitive indicators across 35 ministerial departments. “Today, the gender-responsive budgeting initiative has reached a decisive milestone,” said Ahmed Berrada, Director of Morocco’s Center of Excellence for Gender-Sensitive Budgeting. “After a phase of awareness-raising and ownership-building, it is now embedded in a dynamic of consolidation, marking the effective integration of the gender dimension at the heart of the budgetary process.” Morocco continues to develop tools to strengthen the link between gender objectives and public resources. The Gender Equality Marker, for example, piloted in 2024-2025, provides a mechanism to classify and verify the extent to which public expenditures contribute to gender equality. Such tools can help move the discussion from whether gender considerations are reflected in budget documents to how they are reflected in the allocation and use of public resources. Gender Budgeting in Practice The Ministry of Transport and Logistics provides a concrete example of how this approach can inform sector policy. As part of the gender budgeting process, the Ministry conducted a Gender Sector Analysis in 2025 to examine how women and men experience transport differently, particularly in rural areas. The analysis highlighted constraints including insufficient rural transport services, inadequate infrastructure, and irregular service frequency, alongside concerns around safety and harassment. These findings matter not only for economic policy, but also for improving women’s opportunities and livelihoods, a goal the World Bank supports in its agenda to help create more jobs. This is particularly important in Morocco, where less than 1 in 5 women are active in the labor market, constraints on safe and reliable mobility can further limit access to employment and other economic opportunities. Gender budgeting to improve transportation via public spending is therefore key. From Spending to Getting Results Morocco’s institutional foundations are strong, but the next challenge is to ensure that gender budgeting consistently influences decisions throughout the budget cycle. Our recent report, Gender Budgeting in Morocco: Challenges, Opportunities and Lessons from Global Evidence, points to key aspects of successful GRB experiences. These include strong political commitment and capacity within government; a solid legal and institutional framework; and, mechanisms (and data!) to capture and monitor results. The report documents Morocco’s successful GRB journey and identifies areas where implementation that can be strengthened, particularly at the decentralized level and in the monitoring and evaluation of results. The World Bank is supporting this agenda through analytical work, technical assistance, and operations. Morocco is one of the World Bank Group’s Fast-Track countries under the Gender Strategy 2024-2030. The ENNAJAA project supports the institutionalization of gender budgeting, connecting it to medium-term budget programming through the application of gender budget tagging in ministerial triennial planning cycles. The project also supports capacity building through the CE-BSG, which has trained more than 800 civil servants across central and regional government. Morocco has therefore moved well beyond introducing gender budgeting as a policy concept. The next phase is to deepen implementation by strengthening the use of gender evidence in sector planning, improving the measurement of results, and reinforcing accountability for how public resources contribute to closing gender gaps. The opportunity now is to turn a well-established gender budgeting framework into an even stronger instrument for improving the effectiveness, equity, and accountability of public spending.