'Youth and Gender Sensitive Public Expenditure Management in the Pacific' is a research and consultancy project to help Pacific Island governments develop public expenditure management systems responsive to gender and youth issues.

Youth and women in Pacific Island developing countries are considered particularly vulnerable for many reasons. The lack of opportunity for income generation and decision making for both groups of people cannot be addressed by social policies alone. Also needed are economic policies and resource allocations that directly address both the causes of their disadvantage and the social relations, structures and organizations that maintain that disadvantage. This project aims to promote gender equality and greater opportunities for young people improving efficiency in expenditure allocation and resource use through effective targeting and monitoring within public management. This will, in turn, increase productivity and improve equity and social stability.

The project will develop and apply a methodology for a 'people centred' approach to public expenditure management that is economically, politically and culturally appropriate for the developing countries of the Pacific. A people centered approach to budgets focusing on youth will be developed and piloted over a budget cycle in Samoa while a gender sensitive budget exercise will be developed and applied in the Marshall Islands for 15 months over the 2002/2003 budget cycles. These case studies have three objectives:

1. To assist in the design of "people-centered" budgets and gender-appropriate policies, programs, and institutions based upon global 'good practices';
2. To assist governments to collect disaggregated data on gender and youth;
3. To build the capacity of senior government officials and representatives of women's and youth organizations to support the implementation of gender- and youth-sensitive public expenditure management.

The outcomes of these two country case studies will be evaluated for their strengths and weaknesses in contributing to sound public expenditure management and to good governance. The case studies will also be assessed for the replicability of the methodology for adoption by governments and civil society groups elsewhere in the Pacific.

The University of South Australia (UniSA) Project team will provide technical assistance to support the core goals of people-centred budgets. These core goals are to:

1. Raise awareness of the policy issues and budgetary impacts for women and men, boys and girls and between different groups of people according to age, socio-economic class, ethnicity, race, location and so on;.
2. Promote transparency and accountability of government policy commitments and budgets in relation to gender, age and so on; and-
3. Change policies and budgets to ensure equity and equality of opportunity between men and women, different generations, ethnic groups, rural/urban locations and so on, according to local priorities.

1. Assistance in enabling civil society stakeholder participation in the gender/youth-responsive budget pilot in the two countries. A central lesson of people-centred budgets is that strategies to strengthen the role of civil society are crucial. Civil society participation in public expenditure management is one of the pillars of good governance and will be a key component of the UniSA approach.
2. The incorporation of international best practice into the pilots along with opportunities for participants to benchmark what they are doing.
3. A reflexive and coherent team approach to the implementation of the technical assistance. That is, the consultants will continually feed the results of the different tasks back into the regular team debriefing sessions so that the technical assistance is adjusted to reflect the information gathered from the field. The delivery of the technical assistance will be tailored to suit the different budgetary cycles of the two countries, avoiding adding to the workload of officials at the end of the financial year.