ACTIONAID Zimbabwe has called for gender sensitive budgets and policies to ensure equal access to services.
This emerged during the launch of its gender responsive public services and tax justice research report yesterday.
The report pointed towards critical discrepancies between national policies and their implementation in the process affecting particularly women and girls in marginalised communities.
ActionAid programmes and policy manager Ruvimbo Nhunhama said the country needed to domesticate tax policies in a bid to close glaring gaps.
“Some of the crucial factors that have hindered or affected full implementation of some of these policies within our health strategies and so forth are the issue of availability of enough funding to purchase what needs to be purchased to ensure we are able to provide sexual reproductive health services,” Nhunhama said.
“It could be pills, it could be condoms and any other things that we need to ensure we protect ourselves from viruses and also are able to prevent unwanted pregnancies therefore this requires sufficient funding for infrastructure training services as well as political commitment to ensure full realisation of SRHR [sexual and reproductive health rights] services, particularly for women and girls.”
Women’s Affairs ministry chief director of gender policy, planning and programme management Lilian Matsika said there was an urgent need for a comprehensive bottom up approach to ensure sustainability and equal access to services for all.
“The non-involvement of the community will only lead to the structuring of irrelevant policies,” she said.
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Reports indicate that women and girls have continued to bear the brunt of unequal and gender insensitive budgets.
