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One of the most important constraints in realizing women�s rights and achieving the Millennium Development Goals is the inability of governments to account properly to women�s needs, Mrs Afua B. Ansre, National Programme Director, United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), noted on Thursday. She said improving accountability to women begins with increasing the numbers of women in decision-making. Mrs Ansre was speaking at a two-day national workshop on Monitoring Gender-responsive Budgeting in Accra. She said that improvement required good governance, stronger mandates, clearer performance indicators, better incentives, sustained advocacy efforts and regular monitoring. �You need monitoring to find out successes and failures. You need monitoring to enable you to make policy changes..., we need monitoring to know what we or our country can be proud of,� she added. The workshop is being organised by the Gender Development Institute (GDI), Ghana, with sponsorship from UNIFEM to equip Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), Non-Governmental Organisations, Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) with practical tools to understand monitoring and analysis of gender responsive budgeting. Mrs Ansre urged all gender experts, CSOs and other stakeholders to join forces to address the constraints and also hold governments accountable. Mr Wilbert Tengey, Chief Executive Officer of GDI, Ghana, stressed the need for governments to apportion financial allocations in such a way that activities which directly and indirectly supported the full emancipation of women were cared for. He said gender responsive budgeting was an important political tool to redistribute national resources, adding �it is crucial that CSOs and other partners are equipped to monitor the system to ensure its effect on women, men, boys and girls in our societies.� Mr Tengey said gender responsive budgeting should not be seen as making a separate national or organizational budget for women�s issues. Rather it should be promoting gender equality as well as supporting other policy objectives, such as more efficient use of resources enhancing effectiveness of service delivery, enhancing the evidence-based nature of policy making and supporting the consumer-focus or friendliness of government expenditure. Mr Tengey said although the Government of Ghana had taken up gender budgeting at its own initiative, CSOs and NGOs had an important role to play in pushing the agenda forward and, most importantly, to monitor whether the right things are being done. He, therefore, tasked CSOs and the NGOs to ensure that there was improvement in efficiency and that public expenditure benefited those who needed it most. It should also improve on the monitoring process; track the implementation process to ensure that corruption, discrimination and inefficiency are reduced; hold public representatives and governments accountable for public finances; and recognize the needs of the poorest and the powerless in society. Ms Jane Kwawu, an international gender expert, stressed the need for CSOs to come out with a voice to put governments on their toes to account properly to the people. She commended the organizers of the workshop, saying, �it would demystify the myths around gender responsive budgeting�.