This document summarizes the conclusions and recommendations from a workshop on tracking nutrition-relevant budget allocations. Key findings include the difficulty identifying nutrition-specific interventions and weighting nutrition-sensitive programs. Recommendations are to standardize definitions, conduct peer reviews for greater harmonization, and use flexible weighting ranges to only include clearly nutrition-sensitive programs. The overall aims are to estimate baseline funding for nutrition-specific interventions to identify gaps and advocate for more funding, and shape other sectors to be more nutrition-sensitive.

1. Workshop on tracking of nutrition-
relevant budget allocations
Bangkok, April 15-16 2015
Conclusions and
recommendations

2. Conclusions
Key findings and experiences from the country exercises
• Analyses focused on national Government budgets publically
available – a wide range of different sectors/Ministries/programmes
were included
• Did not include local government/decentralized budgets, off-budget
donor, NGO, multilateral and private funding
• In national budgets, difficult to identify the nutrition specific
interventions as per the Lancet – so some focused on proxy
programmes targeting the 1000 days
• Weighting exercise of nutrition-sensitive interventions was
challenging and highly varied; no standardized approach between
countries
• Cannot link investments directly to impact/outcomes
• The results of this exercise should not be considered final: first step

3. Conclusions
On nutrition-specific:
• Consensus to use the Lancet recommendations for
‘nutrition-specific’ interventions
• But sometimes “school feeding” or “food aid”, for
example, may be categorized as “nutrition-specific”,
when they are not targeted to nutritionally
vulnerable groups, do not have specific nutrition
objectives (1000 days) - and no evidence of impact
stunting/undernutrition
– Misleading outcomes a critical risk of this exercise.

4. Conclusions
On nutrition-sensitive
• The Lancet is a useful starting point together with
the UNICEF conceptual framework on underlying
determinants and the list on nutrition outcomes
from the Donor Network.
• But questions remain on:
– which programmes/interventions to include in non-
Health and Nutrition sectors, with clearer criteria on
nutrition sensitivity and presence of deliberate
nutrition objectives and indicators, focused on 1000
days

5. Conclusions
On weighting:
• Weights assigned for similar interventions varied widely between
countries
• Need for clearer, standard definitions, criteria, norms
– Although not aiming to compare countries
• Need to obtain sufficient information about programs in order to
determine which components are nutrition-sensitive, otherwise
better not to assign any weighting (e.g. “water supply”)
• Cap at 75% for nutrition-sensitive
• 25% is too high in some cases
• Discussed and agreed on a series of questions (personnel, disease
prevention and control, nutrition in emergencies, dietary
diversification, in-kind food distribution in social protection, school
feeding)

6. Conclusions
• A key objective is to estimate the baseline budget
allocations for nutrition-specific & identify gaps.
= MORE MONEY FOR NUTRITION
Urgent need to focus resources on scaling up
nutrition specific interventions
Key advocacy tool will be the analysis of the
gap between available budgets and well-
costed plans

7. Conclusions
• The analysis of other sectors on nutrition sensitive
interventions needs to start with identifying how
nutrition-sensitive programmes are, and whether they
are addressing undernutrition (or not)
– Starting point should not be to present a picture with large
investments, which may be unfocused
• Aim is to shape the programmes and interventions to
be more nutrition sensitive, to be able to address
undernutrition
= MORE NUTRITION FOR THE MONEY

8. Conclusions
• Large risk if estimates for nutrition-sensitive
budgets – including many programmes and costs
which are unrelated to nutrition outcomes - are
presented as “the total available envelope for
nutrition”
• Could result in decision-makers and donors
perceiving that sufficient financing already exists
for nutrition
• And result in nutrition-specific interventions
continuing to be underfunded

9. Recommendations
• Before embarking on these exercises, need to be very clear
on the aims:
– more investment in scale up of nutrition specific interventions
and making key sectors more nutrition sensitive
• Standardize definitions and create a more detailed
checklist, criteria and menu of examples, of nutrition-
specific and nutrition-sensitive interventions, while
allowing for contextualization.
• Conduct a peer-review process and/or independent expert
review of country budget analyses towards greater
harmonization of criteria/definitions
• Use more flexible ranges of weighting, including <25%, and
only of programmes which are clearly nutrition-sensitive

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

11. Second Asia workshop
• Second Asia workshop to be held in Oct/Nov
2015, targeting:
– rest of Asian SUN countries
– Countries/States considering joining SUN
– Selected countries from this first workshop, to share
analysis, experiences, lessons
• Focus will be on financial tracking, but also
costing, financial gap analysis, costs of
undernutrition, cost-effectiveness, investment
cases