Challenges

The decisions governments make about how to finance social policies and services are critical to children and to equitable development overall. If allocations are insufficient, concentrated on better-off groups, or used poorly, all children, and especially the most disadvantaged, risk losing access to services and programmes that enable them to survive and thrive. Many of the obstacles to improving child outcomes can be directly traced to public financial management challenges. For example, poor quality education is often a result of high teacher absenteeism, which itself may be due to delayed salary payments as a result of poor funding flows. Governments may see education as a priority, but they often fail to appropriately fund multisectoral interventions, including those in health and social services, needed to address the problem.

Toward a Solution

The United Nations Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF) work on Public Finance for Children (PF4C) seeks to achieve the realization of children’s rights through the best possible use of public budgets. This requires identifying and addressing public financial barriers so that the public budget is sufficient, efficient, effective, equitable, transparent and accountable. The core actions of the UNICEF PF4C Programme Framework include: 1) supporting evidence generation to advocate for public investments in children; 2) engaging in budget processes to influence allocation decisions; 3) empowering communities in budget tracking and participation to strengthen financial accountability; and 4) supporting resource mobilization. PF4C is relevant to all areas of children’s rights. In education, these efforts are mainly focused on advocacy and support for protecting, prioritizing, and strengthening public expenditure on education to ensure all children have access to quality education and fulfill SDG4, and to build transparent and resilient education systems.

This work often builds on or complements that of other public financial management (PFM) actors, including international financial institutions and bilateral agencies, leveraging existing PFM tools while adding a child lens. Activities at national level are increasingly complemented by engagement at subnational levels and are being carried out across all country types. UNICEF also works to create tools and support pilots to fill data and evidence gaps related to investments in children by building on others’ initiatives, such as the World Bank’s BOOST, which have worldwide applicability for knowledge sharing.

Nearly all UNICEF Country Offices engage in some aspects of PF4C, for the following purposes, among others: 1) better reflect child-related policy commitments in budget processes; 2) identify cost-effective and equitable ways to deliver services, and plan, cost and budget them; and 3) improve the flow and utilization of budgeted resources for service delivery. In 2022, a total of 144 UNICEF Country Offices were working on PF4C, with 89 focused specifically on PF4C programming for education . PF4C programming has achieved results for education spending and capacity-building in many countries. For example, in Cambodia, UNICEF contributed to capacity development of key education stakeholders in linking inclusive plans with budgets and in district- and school-level financial management. The increased capacity of school staff, especially in provinces with poor performance, paved the way for improved education provision, and UNICEF is following through by focusing on getting more resources to schools in poor provinces and supporting financial planning at the school level. In Malawi, UNICEF analysis and advocacy helped make education spending more equitable by eliminating school fees for the poorest and setting up a public fund for scholarships for girls. In Somalia, UNICEF worked with provincial governments to develop education sector plans and cost them using an activity-based, participatory approach, which resulted in stronger sub-sector financial plans and more adequate resourcing for implementation. These efforts contributed to a steady expansion of investments in education, from 6.7 to 12.0 per cent in Somaliland and from 2.0 to 8.0 per cent in Puntland between 2011 and 2013.

In 2022, more than 138 UNICEF Country Offices identified and addressed public finance-related bottlenecks to service delivery, ensuring available funds could be spent more efficiently and effectively. Successful examples such as this demonstrate how PF4C actions can offer a sustainable and replicable way to improve results for the education sector, and ultimately, for children, particularly among low-income countries. Challenges in service delivery in any sector cannot be solved by solely injecting funding into the problem areas, but instead require a multisectoral and multi-stakeholder approach. UNICEF’s PF4C Framework focuses not only on the adequacy of spending, but also on efficiency, effectiveness, equity and transparency, addressing public finance challenges for concrete and sustainable results.