Report Nº: 108211/08/2024
During the government of Alberto Fernandez, the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity was created with a substantial budget. The complaints against it confirm a very low efficiency in managing these funds. This is another example of the need to organize the State, instead of continuing to add bureaucracy.
The fight against gender violence has been explicitly present in Argentina’s public policy agenda for more than 3 decades. In 1992, the National Council of Women was created within the scope of the Presidency of the Nation. In 2017, it was transformed into the National Institute of Women with financial autonomy and its own budget. In 2020, it increased its hierarchy when it was transformed into the Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity.
The contrast between this process and the discovery –casually and belatedly– that the former president who promoted the creation of this Ministry is involved in acts of violence against her partner provokes dismay and anger. The fact is as ironic as it is easy to criticize. Much less frequent and more complex is to approach a serious self-criticism to elucidate the causes of such low effectiveness of public policies aimed at preventing this type of crime.
A relevant starting point is to quantify the volume of public funds allocated to this policy. Considering only the national level, according to budget execution data from the Ministry of Economy, expressed at current prices, it is observed that
These data show the growing budgetary commitment that the national State had with the objective of caring for women. In the last decade, different governments with different ideological tendencies allocated more and more resources to the cause of women. The peak was achieved with the creation of the Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity and the 24-fold increase in the budget compared to what was being spent during the previous governments. Thus, evidence shows that the fight against gender violence had no shortage of national public resources.
As in the rest of the public sector, the main problem is not the lack of resources but management deficits. A repeated strategy is that in the face of deficiencies in one State agency, instead of solving the problem, another agency is created to assume similar responsibilities. This generates overlaps increasing spending without improving results. In the case of the fight against gender violence, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs overlaps with the provincial Ministries of Women’s Affairs and with the municipal Secretariats of Women’s Affairs. Three bureaucratic structures in the same attempt to make up for the deficiencies of the Judiciary, which has the competence and responsibility to fight against all crimes, including gender-based crimes. If Justice were empathetic to the victims, it would not be necessary to set up parallel bureaucratic structures.
To be more effective in the fight against gender violence it is essential to organize the State. At the national level, efforts should be concentrated on managing and disseminating statistics on gender violence. Currently, there is an Integrated System of Cases of Gender-Based Violence, but it is limited to counting support interventions, without informing the number of cases, their characteristics and the effectiveness of state intervention. A comprehensive statistical system would make it possible to monitor the results in the fight against gender-based violence obtained by each province, promoting accountability and, most importantly, social pressure for the improvement of public management.
Overlapping agencies with similar functions, between different levels of government, is a widespread practice in Argentina’s public sector. It is politically attractive because it makes it possible to appear committed to society’s demands and serves as an excuse to s. Until this bad management practice is reversed, there is no possibility of achieving a sustainable fiscal balance with good quality public services.
