CABRI’s Building Public Finance Capabilities for Nutrition (BPFCN) programme kicked off in January 2025 with country-teams from Liberia, The Gambia and Ghana. These cross-sectoral teams, representing officials from ministries of finance, gender, education, agriculture and health, are seeking to address challenges at the intersection of public financial management and nutrition.
We learnt the value of close, non-hierarchical collaboration between ministry of finance and sector stakeholders from an earlier CABRI-UNICEF collaboration tackling sector-specific public finance challenges, The BPFCN programme takes this one step further, bringing together multiple sectors with finance ministries to tackle cross-sectoral nutrition problems. Cross-sectoral public finance issues bring about unique challenges for government – addressing them requires a level of coordination and collaboration often missing in the public sector. It requires countering traditional public financial management (PFM) approaches which enforce sector boundaries in an (often misguided) attempt to simplify delivery responsibility and streamline accountability.
At a problem framing workshop in February 2025, the country-teams from Liberia, Ghana and The Gambia settled on problem statements related to inadequate domestic financing for nutrition interventions. This was perhaps to be expected – Liberia currently allocates no domestic resources to nutrition-specific interventions; resources for Ghana’s school feeding programme are 57% of the minimum required; and The Gambian government has only managed to domestically fund school feeding programmes in 6% of its schools. There was however recognition that limited fiscal space to increase domestic financing for nutrition requires that the country-teams also understand the technical and operational inefficiencies co-existing with and worsening resource constraints. The country-teams formulated their problem statements as follows:
Ghana: Pupils lack sufficient nutritional meals at schools depriving the most vulnerable children from developing cognitively and physically due to inadequate government funding.
The Gambia: Inadequate and irregular coverage and funding of the school feeding programme negatively impacts the nutritional status of school children.
Liberia: There is limited domestic financing for nutrition-specific interventions hindering the fight against malnutrition.
Team Ghana’s problem deconstruction exercise led the team to identify several causes that may have gone unidentified if the team wasn’t encouraged to think outside of strict sector boundaries or narrow PFM technicalities. These included poor selection of caterers associated; caterers’ limited financial management capacity leading to payment and implementation delays; inadequate infrastructure at schools to support school feeding programmes; and limited monitoring of school feeding programmes impeding attempts to increase both operational and allocative efficiency. At the framing workshop, the team committed to evaluating the e-monitoring system which manages cater selection and payment; improve the functionality of the technical working group on the school feeding programme; and sensitise and train caters on financial management.
In deconstructing its problem, Team N’danaan from The Gambia identified causes including weak coordination of nutrition agents and budgets; fund disbursement delays and cash rationing; inadequate oversight as to how funds are spent by schools; lack of bottom-up and down political will to fund nutrition; and school selection criteria which contribute to inequitable allocation of resources. On the latter, it was interesting to learn that to become part of the school feeding programmes, schools require infrastructure such as separate boys’ and girls’ toilets with flushing facilities, a fully functional canteen, and a minimum level of electricity. In many rural schools, these requirements are not met and would require additional capital investment. Without this, children most in need will continue to be denied access to vital school meals. As part of its first steps, the team will investigate what has contributed to the successful monitoring and reporting of the School Improvement Grant and how lessons from this can be applied to school feeding programme; explore how capital development and maintenance decisions are made to support more equitable selection of schools; and, work closely with the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education to support their nutrition leadership and coordination.
The causes identified by Team Liberia included nutrition knowledge gaps amongst stakeholders such as the ministry of finance and parliament; high dependency on external resources, which is seen to potentially crowd out domestic allocations; weaknesses in coordination of nutrition projects; and, underutilisation of innovative financing mechanisms. Preliminary action steps identified by the team include exploring new sources of financing for nutrition including diaspora remittance taxes and earmarking health taxes and pushing for the introduction of a dedicated budget line for nutrition-specific interventions under the Ministry of Health.
The teams will continue to deconstruct their problem statements and refine their action plans. They will do this with the support of their CABRI coaches through an iterative and adaptive action-learning approach. In May, we will all meet again at the virtual mid-term review workshop to reflect on the teams’ progress and discuss their next steps.
The BPFCN programme is funded by the European Union and BMZ and implemented by GIZ.