Despite the challenging circumstances of 2020, PAI’s government accountability partners in seven countries – Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia – succeeded in tracking family planning (FP) budget data and advocating for the allocation, disbursement and, most importantly, spending of government funds for FP programs and contraceptives. Together, PAI and its partners produced a second set of Family Planning Budget Scorecards (“scorecards”), featuring governments’ performance in Benin, Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire for the first time.
Used by partners in their meetings with health and finance ministry officials, parliamentary committees and technical working groups, the scorecards are advocacy tools designed to hold governments accountable for meeting their commitments to fund FP programs and contraceptives. Each country-specific scorecard provides a snapshot of the government’s performance in one fiscal year on meeting those commitments and assesses the transparency of the budget data required to track them. Partners collect official budget data for the scorecards using the Common Framework for Measuring Government Spending on Family Planning, a standard set of indicators developed by civil society advocates and PAI that measures annually the performances of governments in allocating, disbursing and spending their own resources on FP supplies and services.
Without a comprehensive tracking mechanisms like the Common Framework and the scorecards as advocacy tools, civil society would have difficulty holding governments accountable for their national and international commitments to spend domestic resources on FP.
As you’ll see, each scorecard features three main sections: 1) government’s performance on six indicators related to FP budgets; 2) trends in government FP allocations and expenditure over a three-year period; and 3) an assessment of the transparency of FP budget data sources. For advocacy purposes, partners highlight key recommendations to improve FP budgets and budget transparency on the scorecards.
