The national parliament in Ethiopia is one of the three bodies of the government with functional responsibility to ensure constitutional rights are respected and public properties and finances are properly accounted for the promotion of human right principles. In line with this is the roles and responsibilities of the legislative body in the national budget process. Accordingly, the main role of the national parliament is to approve and make appropriation of the national budget. In approving the national budget, the task at federal and regional level is solely given to the legislative body. Based on the budget summary developed by Ministry of Finance and Economic Cooperation (MoFEC), the parliament approve the budget with these procedures, i.e., review, amendment and approval. The parliament has also the mandate to monitor and evaluate federal sectors performance in terms of their budget implementation and achievement of development plans. At this point, budgeting issues are addressed through its standing committee allotted for each government executive bodies. The parliament has a number of standing committees assigned to follow up each sectors performance against their budget usage. In this case, Women and Children Standing Committee follow up the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs sectoral performance towards GEWE and indirectly follow up the implementation of other executive bodies on GEWE via their respective standing committee. For reasonable reason, however, the committee directly monitor some selected sectors. In terms of budget control the body deals with performance review; questioning whether the allocated budget are used towards achieving intended goals. In addition to the Office of the Federal Auditors General that is in charge of controlling, issues are also addressed by Expenditure Administration Standing Committee of Parliament. These responsibilities of the Ethiopian legislative body make its role to be regarded as threefold and very strategic to achieve gender equality. Taking this into account, the Ministry of Finance and Economic Cooperation with the support of UN Women has conducted gender gap analysis of the Public Financial Management (PFM) in 2017 where Parliamentarians are also considered as one of the key stakeholders engaged in PFM. One of the key findings of the analysis revealed the key role of parliamentarians in ensuring inclusion of interventions in sectors plans to address gender issues however there is a need for specific tool for Parliamentarians to help them review the budgets in a gender responsive manner, other than the GRB guideline which was developed in 2012. As a way forward, a recommendation was made to develop tool for Parliamentarians that they can use as they review sectoral plans. As a result, MoFEC with support of UN Women was able to develop the Amharic and English version of the toolkit to communicate the role of the parliament and proposed actions for the betterment of future interventions in gender responsive manner by Sectoral Ministries. In order to make the toolkit available in both languages for parliamentarians and also to be able to share it regionally and globally, it has become necessary to edit and finalize the english version of the document in addition to the Amharic version.
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