West Jakarta Aims to Strengthen Social Justice Through Gender-Responsive Budgeting

The West Jakarta Municipal Government is targeting the strengthening of social justice across all regional development policies through the implementation of Gender-Responsive Planning and Budgeting (PPRG). Head of the People’s Welfare Section of the West Jakarta Secretariat, Abdurrahman Anwar, stated that this strategic step is being taken to narrow the gender gap and ensure that the regional budget allocation targets the needs of all levels of society fairly and accurately. “The gender-responsive budgeting style is crucial because there has been a misconception that public budgets are neutral,” said Abdurrahman during a gender mainstreaming technical guidance session attended by 163 participants on Tuesday. In reality, the impacts of development are often felt differently by men, women, children, the elderly and persons with disabilities due to differing social roles and biological needs. He emphasised that this technical guidance activity, held online on 9-10 June 2026, is not merely a ceremonial agenda but an effort to mature the capabilities of budget planners at every level of the bureaucracy. “This activity is expected to encourage the ranks of the West Jakarta Municipal Government to become more responsive to issues of inequality in all development sectors. The end result is the realisation of equitable and just development,” he said. With budgeting based on gender analysis, structural barriers that trigger inequality in access, participation, control and benefits of development are expected to be eliminated from the planning process. This strategy is realised through the formulation of policies, programmes and activities that integrate the experiences, aspirations, needs and problems of women and men into the planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation processes across all areas of development. Meanwhile, Head of the West Jakarta Empowerment, Child Protection and Population Control Sub-agency, Dian Anggraini Susanty, explained that the implementation of Gender Mainstreaming through PPRG must produce measurable outputs. Therefore, her agency brought in competent experts to oversee the drafting of gender-responsive regional planning documents. The materials focused on concrete steps for revitalising gender mainstreaming at the regional level, strengthening the urgency of gender-responsive budgets, and the methodology for drafting Gender Analysis Pathway and Gender Budget Statement documents. “We hope this activity can produce regional apparatuses capable of independently drafting gender-responsive budgeting plans in the West Jakarta Administrative City, so that programmes in all development sectors are truly gender-responsive,” said Dian.