SECTION27’s latest report, ‘A Civil Society Assessment of South Africa’s 2026 Gender Budget Statement in the Face of Climate Shocks’ builds on its recent analysis of the national health budget. The report examines whether South Africa’s latest 2026 Gender Budget Statement (GBS) closes the gap between gender equality commitments and budget decisions. It reveals that, although the GBS has expanded significantly, its exclusion of the health sector prevents it from fully assessing how budget decisions affect women’s lives.
As South Africa gears up for Women’s Month, SECTION27 held a series of engagements with women in the Eastern Cape on the impact of climate change. It emerged from these dialogues that many women depend heavily on the public health system including clinics, hospitals and ambulance services. This report looks at whether government is investing enough to keep health services working during floods, droughts, heatwaves, water shortages and power cuts.
The report acknowledges the expansion of the GBS from five government departments to twelve, covering sectors including education, energy, agriculture, employment, social development and economic development. This is an encouraging sign that gender-responsive budgeting is beginning to take root following sustained engagement between National Treasury, civil society and the interdepartmental task team.
The report however argues that meaningful gender-responsive budgeting cannot stop at counting women as beneficiaries of individual government programmes. It must examine how the country’s entire fiscal framework – including taxation, expenditure, borrowing, debt-service costs, fiscal consolidation and implementation – affects gender inequality and socio-economic rights.
Women interact with the public health system in multiple roles: as patients, mothers, caregivers, healthcare workers, community health workers and the people who fill the gaps when public services fail. When clinics are understaffed, medicines are unavailable or services become inaccessible, care does not disappear. Instead, the responsibility shifts into households and communities, where women and girls carry the burden through additional unpaid labour. A pertinent example is where climate shocks increase the demand for healthcare when clinics, hospitals, water systems, electricity supplies and ambulance services are most vulnerable. Women are then expected to absorb the resulting care burden, often without pay or adequate state support.
Health is where the consequences of budget decisions become visible in everyday life. The report argues that a Gender Budget Statement that excludes health cannot fully assess whether public spending is reducing gender inequality or simply shifting the costs of care onto women.
In the main, the report identifies climate change as critical gap. Despite the growing impact of floods, droughts, heatwaves and disease outbreaks on healthcare, education, food security, water access and livelihoods, the GBS does not assess climate-related fiscal risks or whether public spending is strengthening the services that women and poor communities rely on during climate shocks.
This report builds on SECTION27’s analysis released recently, which found that South Africa’s public health system sits at the intersection of economic exclusion, gender inequality and climate change. Together, the two reports argue that budgets cannot advance gender equality while overlooking the public services that sustain women’s lives and absorb the impacts of both austerity and climate change.
SECTION27 calls on National Treasury to include the health sector in the next Gender Budget Statement; assess the gendered effects of fiscal consolidation, debt-service costs and underspending; recognise unpaid care work; and evaluate whether public spending is strengthening essential services against climate shocks.
The next Gender Budget Statement must go beyond identifying women as beneficiaries and show how public spending improves their daily lives. That means investing in health, recognising care, preparing for climate shocks and building public services that women and their families can rely on.
Women should not be expected to carry the cost when public systems fail.
For media enquiries contact:
Pearl Nicodemus | Nicodemus@section27.org.za | 082 298 2636
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