PETALING JAYA: The Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO) has urged the government to make gender-based violence response and childcare support key priorities in Budget 2026, calling for sustained funding to protect survivors and enable women’s economic participation.
Its executive director Nazreen Nizam said allocations must focus on sustaining shelters and crisis services, which often operate on short-term or inconsistent funding.
“Survivors need safe spaces, immediate protection and trauma-informed care.”
She added that a dedicated operational budget should cover essential costs, such as rent, meals, medical care, transport and staffing, to ensure 24-hour protection, especially for women and girls with disabilities so that they may seek help without fear of being turned away.
Nazreen said survivors continue to face barriers in seeking help, from inaccessible reporting systems to the lack of trained personnel in police stations, hospitals and courts.
“Budget 2026 should fund an inclusive design approach that strengthens reporting channels, trains frontliners in survivor-centred practices, and ensures interpreters, assistive technologies and safe digital platforms are available,.”
She also said investments in counselling, legal aid and public awareness must complement crisis infrastructure.
“Ending gender-based violence requires a whole-of-government, gender-responsive budgeting approach that ensures every ringgit directly improves survivors’ lived realities through coordinated and accountable systems,” she said.
WAO advocacy manager Gandipan Gopalan said the Budget should also strengthen shelters’ capacity to operate 24-hour hotlines and emergency response services while upgrading facilities to meet safety, accessibility and confidentiality standards.
“Continuous training for enforcement and service frontliners is vital. Properly trained and sensitised personnel are key to ensuring survivors receive timely, compassionate and effective support,” he said.
He added that childcare support must remain a policy focus as it continues to limit women’s participation in the workforce.
“Childcare remains a key barrier for many women returning to work. Greater public investment and workplace childcare facilities are crucial to enabling women to participate meaningfully in the economy,” he said.
“If we must prioritise, WAO would focus on strengthening gender-based violence services and childcare support in today’s economy, particularly through better training for frontliners, such as police and One Stop Crisis Centre staff,” he added.
Society for Equality, Respect and Trust for All Sabah vice-president Robert Hii said effective budgeting must reflect women’s lived realities.
“What a national budget needs is the ability to listen to what women truly need and build communities of support that address their most pressing issues,.”
He also said a comprehensive, data-driven approach is needed to better capture the diverse experiences of women across regions and socioeconomic backgrounds.
The Gender Budget Group said progress on gender equality “is not catching up with the realities and needs of women today”.
The group’s memorandum calls for “bold and progressive acceleration” through dedicated national funding to strengthen frontline response systems and address emerging forms of gender-based violence, including technology-facilitated abuse.
