Scorecard shows “slow, steady” spike in nutrition funding, butbarely enough

For long there’s been troubling complaints about poor allocation for nutrition in budgets across the country. But budget cycle for 2017 has seen a “slow but steady” increase in financing for nutrition, according to a scorecard by the Civil Society-Scaling up Nutrition in Nigeria (CS-SUNN). The scorecard analyses how Kaduna, Nasarawa and Niger have done […]

For long there’s been troubling complaints about poor allocation for nutrition in budgets across the country.

But budget cycle for 2017 has seen a “slow but steady” increase in financing for nutrition, according to a scorecard by the Civil Society-Scaling up Nutrition in Nigeria (CS-SUNN).

The scorecard analyses how Kaduna, Nasarawa and Niger have done this year with funding for nutrition.

“Through the budget analysis we have seen, we are not where we want to be because the plans they have and we expect them to be implemented have been costed,” said Beatrice Eluaka, coordinator for CS-SUNN.

“What has been released is not enough to fully implement the costed plans.”

Kaduna budgeted N980 million for nutrition out of a total N27b budget for health. By contrast, six in 10 children are too short for their age, four in 10 are too thin for their age and half are underweight.

Nutrition gets only N21.5m out of N87b health budget in Nasarawa, where three in 10 children are stunted, one in 10 suffer from wasting and another one in 10 are underweight.

Niger has N60m for nutrition out of the N13.6b earmarked for health, but three in 10 children there are stunted, one in 10 suffer wasting and 10 out of every 100 are underweight.

Previous commitments require nutrition to account for at least 3% of total budget. 

Deeper tracking indicates nutrition has moved from a stage of having no budget at all to having a budget line.

“There is need to track the budget. It is not just enough to have budget line. Are they funded, how much of what was released is spent and on what?” says Eluaka.

Both officials of the three states under review and CS-SUNN worked on the scorecard-and were part of its dissemination in Abuja at the weekend.

“It is important for us to know what government is spending when it comes to implementation of activities to address the poor indices we have in terms of malnutrition in this country.”