OPM (Clara Picanyol)

Tracking of Resources

Planning, Costing and FinancingCommunity of Practice

CIFF

CSN

Donor Network

REACH

Questions

Tracking of Governments Resources

Preliminary finding on analysis of national budgets; and,

Proposed methodology and categorization framework

Clara Picanyol, 16th of July 2014

Background

• Having reliable data is essential to policy makers to prioritise, to plan, and to make decisions on resource allocation, as well as to monitor and evaluate policy implementation.

• Data availability and capacity to track public financial resources vary from country to country, and largely depend on underlying PFM system

• What is the most comprehensive document on government’s spending plans? The National Budget

• We reviewed on-line published national budgets to understand the level of detail available online

• Note: 3-weeks desk-based reviews; no specific request was sent to Governments

Findings (1 of 2)

• We found 28 out of 51 SUN member countries national budgets published online (55%)

• There are numerous ministries that could potentially contain nutrition expenditures:– Most obvious ones found in all budgets: health, agriculture, education

– Other functional areas appearing in the name of other ministries: water resources, family, gender, children, women affairs, social welfare, community development, youth, environment, labour, local government, rural development, culture, sports, and fisheries

• A nutrition department or equivalent (e.g. cost centre) was found in six countries

Findings (2 of 2)

• For 21 national budgets it was possible to have the budget broken down to the programme level

• Out of them, only 10 countries were identified as having a clear programme targeted towards fighting malnutrition

• The public information available on domestic resources for nutrition is limited to: 1. a programme name,

2. a brief generic programme description,

3. an ‘oversight’ agency (or the agency with the authority to incur expenditures for the programme) and;

4. a total amount allocated to the programme.

Proposed framework

• Step One - Identification: Identify the relevant programmes through a key word search

• Step Two - Categorisation: Assess whether the programmes found fall under the category of “nutrition-specific” or “nutrition-sensitive” investments (in close consultation with relevant stakeholders)

• Step Three - Attribution: Attribute a percentage of the allocated budget to nutrition. 100% of the amount would be allocated in the case of programmes that have been categorized as “nutrition-specific” while 25% of the amount would be allocated in the case of programmes that have been categorized as “nutrition-sensitive”

Limitations: transparency vs accuracy, no comparison across countries