Child Responsive Budgeting in South Sudan: A guide for policy makers and child focused organizations

The world’s youngest country, South Sudan, gained independence in 2011 after years of civil war. But despite improvements in South Sudan since its independence, the situation of children remains critical, with most children having limited or no access to basic social services such as health, education, food, water and sanitation. Cognizant of the critical stage of children, the government is exploring ways of galvanising national resources towards implementing children’s rights. One way of doing this is to ensure government budgets are responsive to children’s issues. Budgets measure the true commitment of policy makers and politicians to child rights promotion and protection and are therefore tools to hold governments accountable for their commitments and to redistribute income and consequently foster growth with equity.

Against this backdrop, the Ministry of Gender, Child and Social Welfare, Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management in South Sudan, in partnership with Save the Children, developed this Child Responsive Budgeting Framework in order to advance children’s rights in South Sudan. The handbook is meant to be a tool for all relevant stakeholders in their efforts to influence and track national and state level budgets to advance children’s rights.

The handbook is divided into various modules covering a number of topics pertaining to child responsive budgeting.

 The key topics covered are:

–         Introduction to Child Responsive Budgeting

–         Introduction to budgeting

–         Analysing government budgets from a child rights perspective  

–         Participatory budgeting

–         Budget tracking

–         Child budget advocacy

–         Key success factors for Child Responsive Budgeting