Budget Transparency and Child Nutrition

In order to track whether we are making progress in reducing child mortality, citizens and child rights monitors need access to information from their governments. This study sets out to establish the degree of budget transparency in five African countries (Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe) in relation to one critical issue: child nutrition. The aim was to identify important transparency gaps, so that we, as civil society, can advocate more precisely for the budget information we need to keep effective oversight.

A questionnaire on Budget Transparency and Child Nutrition was developed and used to conduct research across the five African countries. The research resulted in a number of general cross-country and country specific findings: (i) the level of budget transparency in relation to child nutrition was found to be inadequate across the five countries; (ii)  Citizens who want to know what their governments are doing to combat child nutrition have a much better chance of reading about intentions and plans, than to back what happens in practice; (iii) Generally speaking, the level of access to expenditure information about child nutrition interventions was very poor; (iv) the lowest scoring section in the questionnaire was the one concerned with public participation in governments’ child nutrition decisions.