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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

Photo from the consultation
November 2015
The 2014 Global Nutrition Report emphasized the need for sufficient financial resources for nutrition and pointed out the importance of countries being able to track nutrition funding. One year after, 30 countries were able to report on the prelimina...
Dr. Lidan Du, SPRING Research Advisor, Ms. Nancy Adero, Program Officer for Micronutrients and Anaemia from SPRING/Uganda, and Mr. Ziba Dokurugu, Agriculture Advisor from SPRING/Ghana, participated in the Catholic Relief Services' 2015 Integrated Nutrition Conference in Nairobi, Kenya.
September 2015
On September 14-15, three SPRING staff presented at the Catholic Relief Services' 2015 Integrated Nutrition Conference in Nairobi, Kenya, contributing to the international dialogue around integrated strategies to improve nutritional outcomes. This co...
Madhukar B. Shrestha presents the results of the PBN study in Nepal
May 2016
SPRING released findings from the multi-sectoral Pathways to Better Nutrition (PBN) Case Study during a national event in Kathmandu, Nepal on April 20th, 2016. The National Planning Commission (NPC) chaired the event. There were over 60 participants ...