Malnutrition remains a significant challenge in many African countries, hindering socio-economic progress. Nutrition interventions are a best buy for governments: “Every dollar invested in proven nutrition interventions in developing countries yields approximately $18 in economic returns”.[1] Despite this, investment in nutrition interventions falls significantly short of requirements. The Global Investment Framework for Nutrition estimated in 2017 that $7 billion per year is required to scale up a package of nutrition-specific interventions to achieve the World Health Assembly (WHA) targets by 2025.[2]
The public financial management (PFM) system plays a key role in ensuring that decision makers allocate sufficient resources to nutrition-specific and sensitive projects. The PFM system should also help to ensure that these resources are spent efficiently and are accounted for reliably. This implies that ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) with responsibility for nutrition projects must collaborate closely with the ministry of finance, as custodian of public finances.
While all line ministries face the challenge of securing scarce resources for their needs and ensuring the PFM system supports sector-specific operational needs, this challenge compounds when it comes to nutrition. Budgets are spread across multiple line ministries, including agriculture, health, education, social protection, and water, sanitation and hygiene.
This “sectoral breadth” necessitates that multiple stakeholders work closely together to understand each other’s needs and constraints. As demonstrated through our 2022-2023 collaboration with UNICEF on the BPFC for Improved Social Services for Children, CABRI’s Building Public Finance Capabilities (BPFC) programme is well positioned to support such cross-sectoral collaboration. With support from EU, BMZ and GIZ, in November 2024, CABRI sent out a call for applications for teams of ministries of finance and nutrition-relevant agencies to join a BPFC for Nutrition programme. Applications were accepted from Ghana, The Gambia and Liberia.
In 2025, these teams will go through a four-week online course to introduce them to the Problem-driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) approach, which is at the heart of the BPFC programme, and collect data on the problem they nominated to better understand how it manifests and its impact. At a four-day framing workshop in February 2025, the teams will continue to learn about the PDIA approach, refine their problem statements, and determine where and how they want to begin acting to resolve it. During the remainder of the year, the teams will work closely with dedicated coaches to resolve their problem. They will also exchange ideas with the other country teams at a virtual mid-term review workshop in May 2025 and at the closing progress-review workshop in September 2025.
[1] http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/333301482398953218/pdf/111273-WP-WBIncentivizingNutritionCompweb-PUBLIC.pdf
[2] https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/4279fa82-5189-568c-9723-344dcd223a3d