RRI.CO.ID, Jakarta - West Jakarta is turning its attention to the city’s budget books as a tool for social justice. It is launching a drive to mainstream gender-responsive planning and budgeting across all local development policies.

The effort, led by the West Jakarta Municipal Administration through Gender Responsive Budgeting Planning (PPRG), aims to reduce gender gaps and ensure regional budget allocations address the needs of every community group fairly and precisely. Head of Public Welfare (Kesra) at the West Jakarta City Secretariat, Abdurrahman Anwar, said the strategy tackles misconceptions about public budgets being neutral.

"A gender-responsive budgeting style is crucial because there has been a misconception that public budgets are neutral," said Abdurrahman during a technical guidance session on gender mainstreaming attended by 163 participants on Tuesday, 10 June 2026.

He noted that development impacts vary across men, women, children, the elderly, and persons with disabilities because of differing social roles and biological needs. The online training held on 9–10 June 2026 was designed not as a mere formality but to strengthen the capacity of budget planners throughout the bureaucracy.

"This activity is expected to encourage the West Jakarta City Administration to be more responsive to issues of inequality across all development sectors. The end result will be equitable and just development," he said, as quoted by Antara.

Abdurrahman explained that gender-based budgeting grounded in gender analysis can remove structural barriers that limit access, participation, control, and benefits from development. This transformative approach begins right at the planning stage.

Gender mainstreaming (PUG) is described by officials as a rational, systematic strategy to achieve gender equality and justice across human life. The approach integrates the experiences, aspirations, needs, and problems of women and men into policy-making, programs, and activities across planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation.

Head of the West Jakarta Sub-Agency for Empowerment, Child Protection and Population Control (PPAPP), Dian Anggraini Susanty, said PUG implemented via PPRG must produce measurable outputs. To that end, the city brought in expert practitioners to guide the drafting of gender‑responsive regional planning documents.

Training modules focused on concrete steps to revitalize PUG at the local level, strengthening the case for gender-responsive budgets, and methodologies for preparing Gender Analysis Pathway (GAP) and Gender Budget Statement (GBS) documents.

"We hope this activity will produce regional officials capable of independently developing gender-responsive budget planning in the West Jakarta City Administration, so that programs in all development sectors are truly gender-responsive," said Dian. ***