Sufficient funding is needed to address malnutrition, yet despite recent progress, it is still difficult to accurately estimate the available financing for nutrition because of its multi-sectoral nature and varied financing sources. To address this gap in data, USAID’s SPRING project developed a practical, user-friendly nutrition budget analysis tool and accompanying users guide in 2015. The tool has since been piloted with a variety of users (government staff, NGOs, and university students) to create a 2018 update, now posted on SPRING's website.
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 tool and guide. A total of 21 participants joined from 10 different organizations. Alfred Boyo, from USAID Uganda, kicked off the half-day session with remarks on how Uganda used results from nutrition budget analysis that SPRING led in 2014-2016: "In Uganda, we learned from this exercise that most nutrition funding was off-budget - this has been an eye opener for politicians and policy makers."
Following presentations around financial data from SPRING and Development Gateway, participants were given the opportunity to use the tool to practice data extraction and visualization for different country contexts. This helped to further refine the tool. In closing the workshop, SPRING project director, Carolyn Hart, linked back to Alfred Boyo's opening remarks, saying that “Nutrition isn't 'loud,' but money is loud. Policy makers and decision makers listen when the conversation is about money. That's why this kind of budget tracking and analysis is so incredibly important and potentially powerful... It helps nutrition be 'louder' in the resource allocation conversation!"
View the event page and presentations here.
