Towards gender responsive policy formulation and budgeting in the agricultural sector: Opportunities and challenges in Uganda Findings from a policy desk review and a gender budget analysis Mariola Acosta, Edidah Ampaire, Ritah Kigonya, Sylvia Kyomugisha, Laurence Jassogne DECEMBER 2016 Key messages  Uganda is progressively strengthening the gender component of its agricultural policies and strategic planning documents. However, a sizable proportion of policy documents remain gender blind.  Gender issues in policies are largely equated to “women’s issues”, with women generally portrayed as vulnerable and marginalized by society. These stereotypical characterizations might reinforce gender inequalities and even become counter-productive. For an improved exercise of gender mainstreaming, gender issues in agricultural policies should incorporate men’s, women’s and youth challenges, opportunities, perceptions and preferences.  Gender allocations in budgets at sub-county and district level remain low, with fluctuations from year to year and with sharp differences between estimated and actual budgets. This makes planning and implementation of gender mainstreaming activities extremely challenging at both district and sub-county levels. The central government should encourage local gender planning processes and increase allocated budgets.  Gender activities planned and implemented at district and sub-county level remain largely informative (e.g. celebration of women’s day). There is need for improved gender planning with a focus on gender transformative strategies. Achieving economic growth while reducing poverty in an equitable manner demands that governments in Sub- Saharan Africa commit actions and resources to address gender inequalities, even more so under a changing climate which is expected to widen social inequalities (Dankelman, 2012). Internationally, the UN asserts that achieving gender equality, development and peace must be supported by explicit budgetary allocation to targeted activities to ensure gender equality at all scales (OSAGI, 2001). Over the past two decades, Uganda has advanced gender equality and empowerment of women. Uganda’s commitment to promote gender equality and equity was confirmed by enacting the National Gender Policy (1997, revised in 2007). Other components of the political and legal efforts to tackle gender inequality include (i) the 1995 Constitution of Uganda in articles 32 (3 & 4); (ii) the Equal Opportunities Act (2007); (iii) the Public Finance Management Act (2015); and (iv) the National Development Plan II (2015/16-2019/20). However, despite all these initiatives, effective gender mainstreaming as a strategy for addressing gender inequalities remains a big challenge, as manifested by Uganda’s Gender Inequality Index of 0.538, ranking 122 out of 155 countries in the 2014 index (UNDP, 2015). By analyzing the degree and nature of the gender integration in different agri-food related policies in Uganda, recent CCAFS research from the Policy Action for Climate Change Adaptation (PACCA) project (Acosta et al., 2015) showed that policies and implementation strategies fall short of addressing gender structural inequalities such as unequal land ownership and access, limited decision-making power, time poverty and low education rates experienced by women in Uganda. Building on our previous research, this Info Note assesses, through a grading system, the level of gender integration of 83 agri-food policies and strategies at national, district and sub-county levels. The study also draws attention to the way men and women are characterized throughout the policy documents. District and sub-county documents were obtained from the