African Child Wellbeing: New Report Reveals Best, Worst Performers

By Henry Neondo

Tanzania, Mozambique and Niger are the three African countries most committed to budgeting for children, a new report launched Tuesday by The African Child Policy Forum (ACPF) shows.

The report, which measures African government’s investment in children, confirms that a country’s commitment to child rights and wellbeing is not dependent on their economic status, but rather on political will and spending priorities.

The African Report on Child Wellbeing 2011: Budgeting for Children reviewed the budget performance of 52 African governments between 2006-2008, focusing on spending in sectors that most directly impact on children. It found a continent of contrasts. Along with the three, the report also names Gabon, Senegal, Tunisia, Seychelles, Algeria, Cape Verde and South Africa who make up the category of best performers allocating the maximum of their available resources to children. 

At the opposite end, the low performers identified in the Performance Index for Budgeting for Children developed by ACPF include Sudan, Angola, Burundi, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone. These countries scored low due to lower levels of investment in sectors benefiting children, the decline of these allocations over the years and relatively high military expenditure.

The report by ACPF - a leading, independent, not-for-profit pan African centre for policy research and dialogue on the African child - was launched at the opening of the Fourth International Policy Conference on the African Child (IPC) currently underway in Addis Ababa , in partnership with the UN Economic Commission for Africa . The conference will examine the challenges facing children in Africa and the policy choices for governments.

“Children’s rights and wellbeing are intrinsically linked with public budgets and this new report reveals stark differences between African countries in terms of their commitment and readiness to translate political rhetoric into concrete budgetary allocations for the benefit of children,” said ACPF Executive Director, David Mugawe. “Trends or changes in budgetary allocations for children serve as proxy measures of the extent to which governments are truly committed to realising the rights of the child.”

In addition to identifying three categories of child-friendly budgetary performance, the Report analyses the extent to which a country’s budget commitment to children relates to the volume of resources at a government’s disposal. Despite lower economic status than some of their neighbours, countries such as Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda and Tanzania scored highly in the Index, whilst conversely, a number of African governments with relatively high incomes including Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Mauritania and the Sudan, scored low.

“The research clearly shows that the sheer wealth of a country does not determine the level of commitment to budgeting for children”, said Mr Mugawe. “Rather, it is a case of political will being translated into action and prioritising children in national budgets”.

Looking in more detail at the four key sectors affecting children in Africa, the report analyses progress in budget spending, or lack of it, on health, education, early childhood development and social protection.  Whilst the last ten years have witnessed encouraging improvements in child health in many African countries with increased immunisation coverage, improved nutritional status and reductions in infant mortality, Africa still has a relatively low level of investment.

Most countries invested only between 4-6 per cent of GDP in health in 2008, well below the commitment made at Abuja in 2001 to spend 15 per cent of national budgets on health. Eight years on, only four countries have reached that target – Liberia, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zambia. And there are sharp contrasts. Whilst Liberia spent nearly 12 per cent of its GDP on health and Rwanda increased health spending by nearly 19 per cent, others, such as DRC, spent less than 2 per cent and health budgets declined in Malawi and Swaziland, whilst others remained almost unchanged.

In education, whilst Africa has made impressive strides both at primary and secondary levels with encouraging results in reducing the gender gap, the region spends less than 3 per cent of the world’s education resources, leaving a significant number of its children out of school. But again, there are vast variations between countries. Lesotho, for example, had the highest expenditure on education (some 13 per cent of its GDP), alongside five other countries who have met the Dakar Education for All target of allocating 9 per cent of GDP to education by 2010 (Djibouti, Botswana, Swaziland, Tunisia and Kenya). In contrast, some of the resource-endowed countries performed poorly, with Sudan and Equatorial Guinea spending just 0.3 per cent and 1.4 per cent of GDP respectively on education in 2008.

Although Early Childhood Development programmes have been shown to be cost effective in the long run and that their benefits surpass their costs, Africa’s investment in this sector has been almost entirely neglected  with only 20 of 52 countries having early childhood programmes in place in 2005, and only 15 per cent  of pre-primary school aged children having the opportunity to attend pre-primary schools.

“Investment in early childhood development has been grossly ignored across the region, despite its very great significance”, said Honourable Jessica Alupo, Minister of State for children in the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development, Uganda.

“In economic terms early childhood development is the first step in the process of human capital development and as a result should be viewed not merely as a vehicle for delivering badly needed social services, but also as an important element of economic development and strategy. Africa cannot continue to ignore this imperative. “

The fourth key sector examined in the report is social protection, especially those initiatives focused on vulnerable children. There is huge unmet need for social protection in Africa – around 80 per cent - and it is the most neglected sector in the continent. “Despite the critical role social protection can play in the lives of children and the contribution such initiatives can make to poverty reduction, many countries in Africa spend less than 3 per cent of GDP on these programmes, the lowest among all regions of the world”, said Dr. Assefa Bequele, Distinguished Fellow of ACPF.

ACPF also highlights the challenges in monitoring governments’ budgets as in the majority of African countries.  The process lacks transparency with limited participation by the wider public, including children. “In Africa public participation in budgeting is far from uniform practice and very much at the embryonic stages”, said Dr. Salim A.Salim, in his taped message to this year’s IPC participants. 

“But some countries, including Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda, are explicitly providing for people’s right to participate more the process and we urge governments to be more transparent and provide disaggregated information to demonstrate the extent to which budget allocations reflect the needs, rights and wellbeing of children.”

The report further reflects on the impact of the global economic crisis on Africa’s children.

With an average fiscal gap of 5 per cent of GDP in the region, budgets for education, health and social protection are being cut and at the household level, families are taking measures which include fewer meals consumed, reduced school enrolment, increased absenteeism and begging in schools, seasonal hunger forcing children into casual labour and increased prostitution among youth, with an associated increase in HIV/AIDS and STIs.