Assalamu alaikum wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuh.

First, allow me to greet everyone, especially my fellow advocates: Happy National Women’s Month!

As you know, gender and development advocacy has always been close to my heart. I am excited about the activities lined up as we advance gender equality and women’s empowerment.

However, as we observe another year of empowering women and girls, my heart goes out to our brothers and sisters caught in the armed conflict in the Middle East. As a Muslim woman who hails from Marawi, a city once ravaged by war, I have seen the devastation that armed conflict brings. After all, bombs and guns do not choose their victims. Thus, I ask you to join me in praying for their safety and overall well-being, and I hope the conflict ends soon.

Here in our country, we do not just celebrate Women’s Day. We commemorate it throughout March to recognize women’s achievements and address critical issues related to women’s empowerment and gender equality, highlighting the essential role women play in nation-building.

The 2026 National Women’s Month Celebration (NWMC) continues under the 2023–2028 campaign banner, “WE for Gender Equality and Inclusive Society," to restore economic momentum, ensure equal opportunities, and equip Filipinos with skills to fully participate in an innovative and globally competitive economy.

The sub-theme, “Lead like the Babaylans, Filipinas!” emphasizes the wisdom and power each of us holds within and highlights women’s leadership that fosters balanced, resilient, and empowered communities. As the Philippines chairs ASEAN 2026 under the theme “Navigating Our Future, Together,” this sub-theme reflects how our womenfolk continue to lead even across the ASEAN region, shaping governance and promoting peace and development.

Indeed, our country has come a long way in pushing for gender equality and women's empowerment. We have maintained our position as Asia’s most gender-equal nation, with the 2025 Global Gender Gap Report ranking the Philippines 20th out of 148 countries with a parity score of 78.1 percent.

As the former Budget Secretary, I am proud of the Department of Budget and Management's achievements and contributions to advancing gender and development (GAD) mainstreaming. We continuously upheld “The Women’s Budget” or the GAD Budget, directing all government agencies to allocate at least five percent of their total annual budgets to gender programs, projects, and activities.

To transform lives, we realized we must go beyond allocation and ensure timely and meaningful implementation. This is why throughout my administration, we continuously strengthened our Public Financial Management (PFM) systems, making them more digitalized, efficient, and transparent. Among these initiatives was mainstreaming gender budget tagging by developing the Gender Accountability Dashboard with the Philippine Commission on Women (PCW), to track how agencies utilize their GAD budgets. This is to ensure that every peso is released on time and for the right priorities. Because behind every allocation, a girl child can go to school, a mother can put food on the table, and a young woman can confidently join the workforce after she graduates.

We also advocated for gender-responsive budgeting, making sure that every budget we submitted to Congress truly reflected the diverse needs of our people, especially the most vulnerable, such as women and girls.

I am also proud to share that under the first-ever multi-framework and multi-stakeholder Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) Assessment, the Philippine public financial management system received above-average scores across seven key indicators on gender-responsiveness. We likewise conducted supplementary assessments to ensure that our PFM systems are also climate-responsive, disaster-resilient, and children-responsive.

Toward peacebuilding, our flagship peace and development convergence program, the PAyapa at MAsaganang PamayaNAn (PAMANA), has notably improved the lives of the Filipino people through capacity-building, reconstruction, and development in conflict-affected areas.

We also made sure that the women, peace, and security (WPS) initiative was not merely included in our priorities but placed front and center as one of the most urgent issues of our time.

In fact, during the 2024 International Conference on WPS, the first ministerial-level conference on the WPS hosted by our country, a resounding message emerged: We must increase our investments to achieve stronger WPS outcomes. With this, we signed the Pasay Declaration, a shared call to action that reaffirmed our collective resolve to put women at the heart of peace processes and governance.

Building on this momentum, the 2025 Philippine Conference on WPS shifted focus from global commitments to local realities—the stories, struggles, and innovations at the grassroots that bring the WPS Agenda to life every single day. At the conference, we underscored the vital role of our local governments in concretizing the national action plan on WPS to respond to the unique needs of their communities.

Beyond budget, as we celebrate National Women’s Month, I am optimistic that the initiative we have built to put women at the heart of governance will continue and be further strengthened. On my part, as Citizen Mina, I will always support this advocacy, for I believe that when we empower women, we also empower the nation. Together, let us advance gender equality and women's empowerment, not just for this month but in our everyday lives.