20 Advancing Gender Equality in Nepal: Refining gender-responsive budgeting for transformative impact 7. Transformative Gender-Equality Investments In spite of many years of gender policies, we observe that there is too little progress towards meaningful gender equality. While Nepal has made some progress, e.g. improving its score on the SDG Gender index from 58(out of 100) in 2015 to 61.3 in 2024, swift action is needed to step up progress. As part of this, the country could usefully consider joining the international trend towards gender-equality investments. These investments and related policies address the underlying root causes of inequalities, such reducing women’s share of unpaid care work, eliminating GBV, ensuring adequate provision of and access to services of key importance, changing harmful gender roles, norms and power relations, and promoting equality of women’s participation in economic, social, political and cultural life. It is very important to acknowledge that moving towards gender equality involves shifting power structures. 6 By providing analysis and evidence of existing inequalities, GRB can provide an approach for shifting power by going beyond vested interests. In order to make progress, it is important to move beyond merely“taking gender into account” towards ensuring that power over public resources is truly shared more equally between diverse groups of women and men, including trans and non-binary people, particularly the most marginalised. Such a shifting of power structures includes a fresh look at the priorities of what is funded through the public budget, putting transformative gender-equality investments high on the government priority list. It is recommended to: • Focus on strategic public investments supporting gender equality and thus a prosperous development of all Nepali people; • Include priority gender-equality investments in all planning and multi-annual and annual budgeting, and formulate specific transformative gender-equality projects in the National Project Bank; 7 and • Focus on fiscal priorities that contribute to transformative progress on gender equality and to enhanced economic growth and well­being, in particular:  Public investments related to care expenditures and equitable provision of care services, including health and education;  Investments and gender equality enhancing policies related to reducing and redistributing unpaid care work, especially in child care and elderly and dependent care;  Investments in gender equality oriented early childhood education;  Securing access to basic services and infrastructure, including running water and electricity for all households;  Introducing gender equality enhancing parental benefits and parental leave schemes; 6 See: Rowan Harvey; Chloe Safier(2021) Transformative Change for Gender Equality: Learning from Feminist Strategies; Publication BY Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Nepal Office, https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/nepal/17794.pdf 7 See https://www.npc.gov.np/images/category/National_Project_Bank_Guidelines.pdf for an overview of the National Project Bank and its activities.