SUN country workshop in Uganda on Budget Analysis

1. Workshop on tracking of nutrition-
relevant budget allocations
Entebbe, April 21-22 2015
Conclusions and
recommendations

2. Conclusions
• We did this exercise to fill a data gap
• Analyses focused on national Government budgets
publically available – a wide range of different
sectors/Ministries/programmes were included and also
on-budget external funding
• Did not include off-budget donor, NGO, multilateral
and private funding
• Focused on advancing with STEP 2, categorizing
identified allocations into: 1) Specific, 2) Sensitive and
3) Potential.
• The results of this exercise should be as completed as
possible for best use with advocacy.
• Advocacy cannot be an after thought and needs to be
tailored to the different audiences

3. Conclusions
On nutrition-specific:
• Consensus to use the Lancet recommendations for
‘nutrition-specific’ interventions.
• Essential to identify ‘proxy’ programmes in the
health sector that most likely include high-impact
interventions targeted to the 1000-days and the
women in reproductive age / adolescent girls.
• Need to include Human Resources
• “Judgement calls” required on which investments
to include in non-health sectors (but most likely
they fall in the nutrition-sensitive category)

4. Conclusions
On nutrition-sensitive
• The Lancet is a useful starting point together with
the UNICEF conceptual framework on underlying
determinants.
• But “judgement calls” required on:
– Which programmes/interventions to include
(especially in non-health and nutrition sectors), with
observable criteria on nutrition sensitivity (e.g. clarity
on the targeted populations and on the expected
nutrition-relevant outcomes)
Examples: dietary diversification through agriculture
programmes; dietary supplementation through social
protection; diarrhea prevention through access to
quality drinking water; etc.

5. Conclusions
On “potentially nutrition-sensitive”:
• Need to obtain sufficient information about
identified programs in order to determine which
components are nutrition-sensitive, otherwise
better not to include them in the budget analysis.
• Useful for dialogue and advocacy with other
sectors
– BUT might be better not to include them when
moving further in tracking “budget release and
spending”

6. Recommendations
• Coordination is the essential backbone for
successful implementation
• A robust, country-owned budget analysis is the
foundation for more in-depth tracking work
• When communicating the results you need to be
very clear on the aims:
– Mobilize more investments (including domestic and
external resources) - identify the resource gap to
scale up nutrition specific interventions
– Better engaging key sectors (including health) to
make their investments more nutrition sensitive – be
clear on which programmes you are focusing on

7. Next steps
• Global Nutrition Report will feature these
initial efforts to estimate nutrition-relevant
budgets, reflecting nutrition-specific,
nutrition-sensitive and potentially nutrition-
sensitive, where possible
• Countries who wish to update/finalize their
estimates for inclusion encouraged to do so
within the next two weeks

8. Next steps
• Conduct a peer-review process and/or
independent expert review of country budget
analyses towards greater harmonization of
criteria/definitions: bottom-up development
of guidance based on identified patterns
• Start to think about off-budget analysis based
on the lessons learnt from the on-budget
analysis