Costing, financial tracking and resource mobilisation
Maximising the Quality of Scaling Up Nutrition Plus (MQSUN+) conducts costing readiness assessments to analyse a common results framework (CRF) or multisectoral national nutrition plan for the required level of detail needed for costing—in terms of intervention activities, targets and coverage—and makes recommendations to ensure readiness. This review also provides useful information on country data gaps.
MQSUN+ recently conducted a costing readiness assessment for Yemen’s national nutrition action plan to verify that sufficient detail is available for high-priority nutrition interventions and to guide the country in what will be needed to undertake a detailed costing.
The project also supports the cost estimation of interventions featured in an operational plan or multisectoral national nutrition action plan. The purpose of cost estimation is to understand how much nutrition interventions will cost to achieve the targets laid out in a CRF or national nutrition plan. Cost estimations for scaling up nutrition are necessary for budget planning and are useful to stimulate resource mobilisation from both domestic and external sources.
MQSUN+ provides technical assistance to support strong financial tracking. The purpose of tracking financial information is to generate reliable financing data essential for policymakers to prioritise, plan and make decisions on resource allocations, and monitor and evaluate policy implementation. Resource tracking is also important for promoting transparency and advocacy for nutrition. To support this, the project assesses existing financial tracking tools and systems and provides supplemental resources or recommendations for financial tracking mechanisms aligned with national nutrition planning. MQSUN+ also conducts budget analyses and estimations of global targets to support countries in tracking trends in their budget allocations and nutrition spending.
MQSUN+ recently supported the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement Secretariat and numerous SUN countries to conduct the annual SUN budget analysis exercise. This included the collection of updated budget data, in-country support and capacity building to carry out the exercise and the compilation of all SUN country data for a meta-analysis of nutrition budgeting. This support will not only build country capacity to carry out future rounds of the exercise independently, but also facilitate stronger data and understanding for budget-based decision making and advocacy.
To support resource mobilisation, MQSUN+ maps existing resources for nutrition, assists in the identification of potential funding mechanisms, and/or develops investment cases for nutrition to advocate for mobilisation of funding.