Improving the quality of future NPERs

from A Guiding Framework for Nutrition Public Expenditure Reviews

References

To improve the public financial management of nutrition expenditures at the country level once the NPER is completed (or concurrently), countries should consider the following:

• Developing an action plan and budget to implement reforms identified in the

NPER. For example, evidence generated in NPERs could help policy makers identify underfunded programs or geographical, inefficient spending patterns (for example, large legacy programs such as food subsidies), and plans to reallocate spending to course correct. • Creating country-specific guidelines for tracking nutrition expenditures.

Definitions of nutrition spending at the country level may evolve over time as countries develop or data availability changes. It is important to document exactly what is included in the analysis to ensure that comparisons (over time) can be made. Countries need to recognize that tracking and evaluating nutrition-related expenditures will be an ongoing exercise, and new expenditure items will need to be tagged as they are included in the budget. • Strengthening or developing a tracking methodology for development partner (DP) financing that generates sufficiently disaggregated data for NPERs.

Collecting data on DP financing can be done through manual surveys, as is done in several countries. However, it would be useful if countries could improve DP financing tracking and monitoring mechanisms by, for example, creating an integrated DP financing module in the financial management information system or integrated financial management system (FMIS/

IFMIS). Integrating the collection of off-budget data into the country’s FMIS/

IFMIS would make it easier to monitor DP financing flows and make corrective allocations. • Improving the visibility of nutrition-related expenditures in FMIS/IFMIS.

Potential measures to improve FMIS/IFMIS include (1) ensuring the proper budgetary tagging of nutrition-related expenditures, which can be done using relevant budgetary tracer line items that are routinely tracked; (2) unbundling nutrition interventions; (3) breaking down salaries and operating costs; and (4) providing insights into subnational allocations of central expenditures. This would help to institutionalize the estimation of public financing for nutrition as part of the routine to track public spending and implement programs. In addition, adequately mainstreaming nutrition tagging into the budget cycle will eliminate the need for assigning subjective disaggregation weights. • Strengthening the monitoring and evaluation function of nutrition-related programs and nutrition information collection within service delivery platforms.

The objective would be to ensure that nutrition programs consistently generate high-quality administrative data (to capture outputs and some outcomes) and that they periodically undergo impact evaluations to assess outcomes and impacts. Such evaluations would enable future NPERs to analyze the effectiveness and technical efficiency of nutrition interventions.