Photo: SA Government
National Treasury Director-General, Ismail Momoniat, spoke about budget allocation at the Presidential Summit on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide (GBVF) on Wednesday.
While acknowledging that the budget for the gender-responsive programme is not going to be enough, government departments have been urged to use the budget properly.
“If the programme is budgeted for, we need to ensure that it is really being used for [its intended use]”, National Treasury‘s Momoniat said.
Momoniat added: “We need to […] analyse whether the departments are spending the allocated funds on that programme”.
Momoniat acknowledged that given the scale of GBVF, whatever government is spending, it would “not be enough”.
“The actual spending is the exercise we have to monitor on a daily basis. We need to do more to address the scourge of GBVF, as the increasing numbers of cases show that we are not doing enough,” he said.
Government announced the allocation of approximately R21 billion over the next three years.
This funding would be used to implement the various components of the National Strategic Plan.
Government said “a significant portion of these funds has been committed to advancing the empowerment of women through procurement, business support, and access to economic opportunities”.
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Meanwhile, Public Service and Administration Deputy Minister, Chana Pilane-Majake, said GBVF is a humanity problem that needs a collective solution.
“What is important is realising that the answers are not going to come from just one institution,” Pilane-Majake said.
Instead, all institutions should be working in unison to eradicate “this mammoth problem that is eating up the lives of women, including children”, Pilane-Majake concluded.
Activists wanted to know what the faith sector is doing to combat GBVF within churches, especially when priests and pastors are the perpetrators.
Highlighting what the faith sector is doing to implement the National Strategic Plan (NSP) on GBVF, Daniela Gennrich said since 2020, the faith sector has organised a group of activists who came together and began to analyse the issues and developed a programme, which responds specifically on the different pillars of NSP.
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“Since then, we […] now have over 600 between ourselves and our coalition partners. We say we are people of faith, who speak out, stand up, collaborate, share knowledge and disrupt norms, and decisively with survivors at the centre to end gender-based violence and femicide.”
Explaining where they mostly find resistance when dealing with issues of GBVF, she said there are often “boy clubs” that are very difficult to penetrate.
Content from SA Gov News. Additional reporting by Cheryl Kahla.
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