Tracking Finances for Cross - sectoral Priorities : common lessons from experiences in nutrition , child protection and gender By Steph

Sectors are the spinal column of the public sector, offering an orderly and pragmatic way of arranging public sector affairs and dicing up resources. The boundaries between them, however , are more arbitrary than is commonly acknowledged. This has become more apparent in recent years as a number of issues which don't fit comfortably in any of the ascribed boxes have risen up the global development agenda. One such issue is nutrition, where amassing scientific evidence has underscored the necessity of a multi-sectoral approach that goes beyond the health sector to stem the underlying causes of malnutrition. Another is child protection, which to adopt UNICEF's definition concerns the prevention and response to violence, exploitation and abuse against children, a task that cannot fall to any single sector alone. Similar issues also arise from more longstanding cross-sectoral concerns, such as gender or HIV/AIDS. The challenges faced when working on issues that cross sectoral boundaries are many, but this article will focus on financial tracking. Financial tracking has received growing attention in recent years, in large part due to heightened demand for transparency and accountability around public expenditure (both in developing country budgets, and in aid budgets), fuelled by a combination of austerity measures, use of modalities like budget support and results-based financing, and stronger and more active civil societies. Financial tracking, in and of itself, demands robust PFM systems in order to generate reliable financial data, disaggregated to the necessary level of detail. It also requires a willingness to share timely information which is often lacking (on the part of donors and NGOs, as well as governments). Financial tracking for cross-sectoral priorities, however, poses some unique challenges above and beyond these. Because budgets and financial systems are built to mirror sectoral structures they do not instinctively delineate for issues that transcend those structures. The tools we have developed don't fit the task at hand; it's like slicing a cake to work out how much flour went into it. Two recent Mokoro assignments have underscored this challenge. In the evaluation of the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement we considered the way the movement has tried, with only modest success, to track resources spent on nutrition in member countries as a means of strengthening accountability around the substantial financial commitments for nutrition that have been made. For UNICEF, we are developing a methodology for measuring public expenditure on child protection to form the …