Engendered Benefit Incidence Analysis: Case of Blantyre Agricultural Development Division (BLADD) Budget

Abstract

National budgets are important for national productivity and economic growth. Unfortunately when policy makers are making national budgets they may assume gender neutrality of its incidence upon implementation. Gender neutrality of government expenditure benefit incidence through the national budgets can only hold if men and women have equal access to opportunities. Unfortunately this is hardly the case on the ground. There are gender roles and social constructions that may lender women in unequal position with men in terms of access to productive resources. Hence the main objective of this paper is to construct and analyze an engendered benefit incidence of the Malawi Agriculture sector budget, with a view to analyze whether the budget is really pro poor or not and whether it is indeed gender neutral. We used secondary data from the Blantyre Agricultural Development Division (BLADD). Hence the results presented pertain to a case study of one major agricultural development Divisions of Malawi. We find that indeed the Budget for Blantyre Agricultural Development Authority (BLADD) was gender biased. Men farmers who are fewer in the smallholder subsistence sector shared 52% of the budget while women farmers who form the majority shared only about 48% of the budget. The expenditures were also not pro poor in that 20% of the poorest farmers shared only about 15% of the overall BLADD budget while the richest 20% shared about 28 percent of the budget. We therefore conclude that public expenditures are not gender neutral as supposed.