This document summarizes the conclusions and recommendations from a workshop on tracking nutrition-relevant budget allocations. Key conclusions include: focusing the analysis on national government budgets that are publicly available; categorizing allocations as specific, sensitive, or potentially sensitive to nutrition; and requiring judgment calls in determining which non-health programs should be included. Recommendations emphasize the importance of coordination, having a robust country-owned budget analysis, and clearly communicating results to mobilize investments and engage key sectors in making programs more nutrition sensitive. Next steps proposed are including initial efforts in the Global Nutrition Report, encouraging updates, conducting a peer review process, and starting to analyze off-budget funding sources.

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