Clean Up on Aisle 5—Bipartisan Senate Supporters Address House Bill Mess of Funding Cuts and Anti-SRHR “Riders”
Transparency, Accountability and Domestic Resource Mobilization
In 2018, the Family Planning Budget Advocacy Expert Group reconvened in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to develop a draft country scorecard, which presents the common framework indicators using language relatable to officials at ministries of health and finance in sub-Saharan African countries. The group also improved the Common Framework indicators, particularly related to outcome and transparency. Please see Annex 1 for the refined framework of indicators. The meeting identified opportunities to:
(a) Use the scorecard to build nation-to-nation peer pressure;
(b) Improve transparency of government spending on family planning; and
(c) Mobilize government funding for family planning as part of health financing reforms.
This meeting report documents the outcomes and next steps of the meeting.
At the inaugural 2016 meeting in South Africa, the Family Planning Budget Advocacy Expert Group sketched out the common framework based on the shared experiences of the transparency and accountability communities and also identified sources of data for the indicators.
The second annual meeting in Chisamba, Zambia resulted in a refined common framework and led to the establishment of a real-time tracking tool for project partners. The tool complements the framework’s end-of-budget-year scorecard, allowing partners to input data and monitor indicators to inform advocacy throughout the budget year. Following the Chisamba meeting, civil society organizations—MANASO in Malawi, TCDC in Tanzania, Samasha Medical Foundation in Uganda and CRHE in Zambia—piloted data collection. PAI developed the real-time tracking tool using Google Sheets in consultation with Samasha and the project partners, and Samasha also provided one-on-one technical support for country data collection.
