Nutrition Budgeting and Financial Analysis

The Role of Budget Analysis
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SPRING recognizes the important role adequate financing plays in any effort to improve nutrition at scale. In its recently released Nutrition Strategy, USAID highlights the importance of financial systems, stating that political will for nutrition must be reflected through financial support, at both the national and sub-national levels.

Tracking financing support requires several steps: costing a national nutrition plan provides estimates of the funding needed to implement nutrition activities; analyzing current budgets (government and donor) creates estimates of funding allocated to implement nutrition activities; analyzing expenditures reveals what percent of allocated funds were spent; and tracking expenditures helps determine why funds did not reach their intended destination.

Maximizing the Quality of Scaling up Nutrition Programmes Framework (MQSUN), UNICEF, the World Bank, and others have completed a number of nutrition costing activities. Costing, however, is only half of the picture: stakeholders need to know whether or not sufficient funding is being channeled to nutrition to meet the estimated costs.

SPRING focuses on the second step—estimating what funding is allocated to implement nutrition activities—and, to the extent that there are available data, how much of that funding was spent. This is what SPRING means by "budget analysis." The resulting information can improve advocacy for nutrition funding, increase funding transparency, and facilitate negotiations for donor funding.

Building from the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement's "three-step" methodology, we have worked with stakeholders in Uganda and Nepal to identify nutrition funding from various sources and across sectors. Complementing other efforts to identify and track nutrition spending, we have developed a methodology for this work that emphasizes the multisectoral nature of nutrition and encourages local ownership of the process through technical assistance and provision of tools to country-level policymakers.

Download "Funding the Cause" (PDF, 2.4 MB), a presentation on this subject given at the 2015 IHEA Conference.

News

Close up image of people's hands preparing greens.
May 2018
As part of a continued effort to increase the reach of SPRING’s nutrition financing and budget analysis resources, SPRING conducted a workshop in Washington, DC on the 2018 nutrition budget analysis...
Poster with the name of the conference and the conference schedule
Aug 2017
SPRING shared findings and recommendations at the 2017 International Health Economics Association World Congress in Boston on how to ensure nutrition policy translates to financing and action.
Amanda Pomeroy-Stevens (SPRING) presents the final results from the Pathways to Better Nutrition Case Studies in DC July 28th, alongside Ssansa Mugenyi (Office of the Prime Minister, Uganda) and Madhu Kumar Marasini (National Planning Commission, Nepal).
Aug 2016
At this event, global experts detailed how stakeholders can use this research to advocate for nutrition policies and funding.