Budgeting for Children Must Deliver Results – UNICEF Charges Kaduna LGs
By Uangbaoje Alex, Kaduna
Kaduna State’s 23 Local Government Areas have been challenged to move beyond simply allocating money in their budgets and ensure public spending delivers real improvements for children and vulnerable households.
The charge was made at a three-day capacity-building workshop for Directors of Planning and Budget from the state’s 23 LGAs, where UNICEF experts linked effective public financial management with child development and inclusive social protection.
Presenting “Investing in Children: Kaduna State,” UNICEF Social Policy Officer, Wakidara Akila, said investment in children must cover critical areas including education, health, nutrition, water and sanitation, social protection and other services essential to their development and wellbeing.
Akila stressed that a budget allocation is not the same as an investment that produces results, urging local governments to track releases, expenditure and outcomes to determine whether public funds are actually improving children’s lives.
She also highlighted the multidimensional nature of child poverty, noting that children can experience several forms of deprivation at the same time, including poor access to education, healthcare, nutrition and basic services.
In a related presentation, facilitator Jessica Bartholomew challenged policymakers to make social protection more inclusive, warning that programmes can fail vulnerable people when barriers linked to poverty, gender, disability, location and social status are ignored.
She defined inclusive social protection as a system that protects people against poverty and life-cycle risks while ensuring that “no one should be left behind.”
Bartholomew identified three major pillars of social protection; social assistance, social insurance and labour-market programmes, covering interventions such as cash transfers, school feeding, health insurance, pensions, skills development and employment support.
She said social protection should follow people throughout their lives, addressing risks from early childhood and school age through youth, working age and old age.
The presentations placed a sharper responsibility on local governments: spending must be equitable, targeted and measurable.
For Kaduna’s LGAs, the challenge is no longer simply how much is budgeted for children and vulnerable people, but whether the money reaches them and whether it changes their lives.
