Budget Analysis in Guatemala

1. Workshop on costing and financial
tracking
Guatemala City, April 28-30 2015
Conclusions and
recommendations

2. Re-cap
• Analyses focused on national Government
budgets publically available
• Did not include off-budget donor, NGO,
multilateral and private funding
• Included discussion on costing and financing
• Presented ongoing systems for tracking spending
in Guatemala and Peru and the results from the
3-step approach by Costa Rica
• The group work focused on completing STEP 2,
categorizing included budget items into: 1)
Specific and, 2) Sensitive.
• The results of this exercise should be as complete
as possible for best use with advocacy.

3. Conclusions
On nutrition-specific:
• Consensus to use the Lancet recommendations to
define ‘nutrition-specific’ interventions.
• Importance of the continuum of care targeted to the
1000-days (up to U3 years for Peru) and women in
reproductive age, especially adolescent girls.
• High-impact interventions included in the continuum
of care but need to be clearly linked to results including
uptake of maternal and IYCF practices.
• Need more clarity on how to include budgeted costs
for Human Resources and Governance for nutrition

4. Conclusions
On nutrition-sensitive
• The Lancet is a useful starting point together
with the UNICEF conceptual framework on
determinants.
• But “judgement calls” required on:
– Which programmes/interventions to include with
observable criteria on nutrition sensitivity (e.g.
clarity on the targeted populations and on the
expected nutrition-relevant outcomes)
– Pending consensus on school feeding, vaccination
and child illness management (if specific or
sensitive).

5. Individuos
afectados o
en riesgo de
malnutrición
Construir capas de nutrición:
Comunidades
y hogares en
riesgo de
malnutrición
Necesidades
públicas
básicas
Patrizia, Fracassi, Abril, 2015
Doble propósito:
1)Más nutrición por el dinero: apalancamiento de inversiones existentes
2)Más dinero para la nutrición: adicionar a las inversiones existentes

6. Recommendations
• Coordination and alignment are essential for
successful implementation
• Where tracking systems are functioning (e.g.
Peru and Guatemala) link them clearly to
nutrition outcomes at population level such as
uptake of maternal and infant and young child
appropriate feeding practices (e.g. women
dietary diversity, exclusive breastfeeding and
complementary feeding, hygiene practices)
• A robust, country-owned budget analysis is the
foundation for more in-depth tracking work

7. Recommendations
When communicating the financial data you need
to be very clear on the aims:
– Mobilize more investments (including domestic and
external resources) - identify the (human and
financial) resource gap to scale up nutrition specific
interventions
– Better engaging key sectors/partners to make their
investments more nutrition sensitive – be clear on
which programmes you want to focus on and how you
are going to make them more nutrition sensitive

8. Next steps
• Global Nutrition Report will feature these
initial efforts to estimate nutrition-relevant
budgets, reflecting nutrition-specific and
nutrition-sensitive
• 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

9. Next steps
• Start to think about off-budget analysis based
on the lessons learnt from the on-budget
analysis
• We would like to systematize the experiences
of Guatemala and Peru to learn and
disseminate the main lessons