Module 6: Child-Responsive Budgeting (CRB)

2. Module 6: Child-Responsive Budgeting (CRB)

3. The budget is the ultimate embodiment of a nation’s priorities as it is a product of political decisions regarding the amount of resources the nation is willing to dedicate to a given policy or programme.

4. Why invest in children? • Ethical argument • Implement rights, achieve equity • Age-sensitivity argument • Childhood is a unique window of opportunity • Economic argument • Productivity gains and economic growth • Political argument • Social cohesion and democratic governance

5. Objective of Child-responsive Budgeting (CRB) • Goal is NOTto • create a new classification of expenditures • introduce new budget procedures • Goal is to • present new criteria • apply tools to measure child responsiveness of allocations to all sectors

6. A child-responsive budget… • Recognizes that all forms and levels of public spending have a potential impact on children • Provides appropriate resource base for progressive realization of child rights • Prioritizes excluded sectors and most vulnerable • Is transparent and allows for effective participation of key stakeholders, including children • Includes accountability mechanisms

7. Main challenges • Availability of information • Openness/priorities of government’s budget work • Availability of expertise • Dominanceof certain ministries, development banks, IFIs, etc. in designing policies/budget • Levelof civil society activism and media interest • Weak public financial management systems

8. Role of development partners in ensuring CRB • Raise child rights issues via analysis and advocacy • Develop capacity of stakeholders, including government, to understand and assess child rights • Fund new spending programmes and policy experimentation

9. Mainstreaming CRB in development partners’ strategies • Country context analysis • Political/institutional, economic and social • Partnering with key stakeholders • Children, politicians, social leaders, CSOs, media, private sector, etc. • Policy and budget dialogue • National/sector plans • Specific studies • Sector working groups • Budgeting monitoring • Capacity development activities

10. Recommended interventions • Perform child-sensitive budget analyses • Good starting point • Classification of Functions of Government (COFOG) • Activities • Identify child-friendly programs, how funded, vulnerabilities • Analyze amounts, distributions, allocations-expends, gaps • Look at impact of revenue side policies (e.g. VAT, subsidy) • Assess impact of different shocks

11. Recommended interventions • Influence the budget via capacity development and opening decision-making processes • Good starting point • Convene and advocate key stakeholders • Activities • Create spaces for making the budget child responsive • Disseminate analyses, policy dialogue, indicator development, verify costed plans, feedback forums • Develop tools, trainings, knowledge sharing

13. Recommended interventions • Improve efficiency • Good starting point • Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) • Activities • Invest in data and information systems • Assess corruption and governance issues • Support media, audit institutions, anti-corruption agencies, other oversight institutions • Help develop cross-national comparative databases and indices of budget openness

14. Recommended interventions • Help secure adequate resources to sustain child-responsive policies • Good starting point • Assess current allocations  budget often already committed and inflexible to support implementation of new policy • Activities • Perform fiscal space analyses, which consider current spending, revenue and financing policies

15. Recommended interventions • Carry out evaluations to promote accountability • Starting point • Assess current commitments (sector/national plan) • Activities • Determine outcomes for verification with beneficiaries • Assess potential long-term impacts • Review policy effectiveness • Determine satisfaction of stakeholders • Be a sounding board for determining ‘what works’

16. Group Activity

17. Case example 2007-13 EU Strategy Paper for a country in East Asia

18. Background • Focal sector is education • ~80% supports sector-wide approach in basic education • Equity focus: remote areas, minorities, special needs • Goal to improve equitable access to quality education • Contribute to govt’s strategy to improve basic educ. • Overall quality • Governance and management systems • Enhance efficiency of planning/budgeting processes

19. Background (cont) • Challenges and risks • Decentralization: • reconciling new roles • Education financing: • low public investment, most funds go to routine expenses (e.g. salaries) with little room for funding education development • Civil service reform: • limited political will to address big bureaucracy, corruption, inefficiencies, low pay • Transparency: • weak PFM mechanisms and auditing and monitoring mechanisms

20. CRB can improve outcomes • Child rights are inter-dependent, with mutually reinforcing effects • Without improvements in other dimensions of deprivations, education outcomes will suffer • Possible design and budgeting enhancements • Coordinated or integrated mixture of school-based and home-base interventions to address other deprivations • Multi-sectoral allocations and tracking

21. CRB can mitigate risks

22. Takeaway from this example • CRB can help achieve objectives of EU programmes • Improves the design and hence learning outcomes • Addresses implementation risks • Context of EU’s new country programme cycle • Important to invest in others’ work aimed at leveraging government resources for greater child-responsive investments

23. UNICEF’s approach and some examples Decentralized monitoring of service delivery CSOs for analysis/advocacy Govt for analysis, implement- ation and tracking PERs PETS CSOs, EU, World Bank, IMF Child allocations and deprivations Ensuring widespread participation Revenue impacts Formalizing govt partnerships Fiscal space Creation of cross-sectoral groups Supporting development of plans and budget Briefings/meetings with key decision makers Costing universal access to basic education or school building Publishing information

24. Adaptable tools to support CRB work • Testing the child sensitivity of the budget • Child rights-aware policy appraisal • Child rights-disaggregated beneficiary assessment • Disaggregated tax incidence analysis

25. Adaptable tools to support CRB work • Assessing quality and credibility of policies via the budget • Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) • Public Expenditure Review (PER) • Public Expenditure Tracking Survey (PETS) • Marginal Budgeting for Bottlenecks (MBB) • Fiscal space analysis

26. Adaptable tools to support CRB work • Stakeholder assessments • Identifying key stakeholders • Mapping opportunities to engage different stakeholders throughout budget cycle • Institutional analysis

27. Group Discussion

28. Group discussion • What are the experiences of CRB in this region? • What are the main challenges/constraints for working on CRB? • What can development partners do to engage more actively in CRB work? How can UNICEF and other CRB partners help?