Kaduna Moves to Tighten Nutrition Budget Tracking With New PMS
By Uangbaoje Alex, Kaduna
Kaduna State is stepping up efforts to track nutrition spending and improve accountability as nutrition desk officers across Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) undergo training on an updated Performance Monitoring System (PMS).
The two-day training, organised by the Civil Society Scaling-Up Nutrition in Nigeria (CS-SUNN) under PINNS 3.0, began Wednesday in Kaduna, with a strong focus on using data to improve nutrition planning, budgeting and implementation.
Speaking at the opening, the Permanent Secretary, Kaduna State Planning and Budget Commission, Mukhtar Abdullahi, said the quality of data generated by MDAs would determine the State’s ability to identify implementation gaps, monitor commitments and direct resources to areas of greatest need.
He stressed that nutrition was not solely a health-sector issue, but a multisectoral development concern requiring coordinated action across health, education, agriculture, water and sanitation, social protection and local government, among other sectors.
Abdullahi charged Nutrition Desk Officers to see themselves as a critical link in the State’s nutrition accountability system, urging them to ensure that information submitted by their respective MDAs was timely, accurate and reliable.
He said the updated PMS would help the State move beyond routine reporting by providing evidence for tracking targets, detecting implementation challenges and supporting informed planning and budgeting decisions.
“As the Commission responsible for coordinating planning, budgeting and development assistance in the State, we are particularly interested in ensuring that nutrition interventions are properly reflected in our planning and budgeting processes and that implementation is consistently monitored. Good data is essential to achieving this objective,” he said.
The training is also designed to equip participants with practical skills to navigate the PMS dashboard, analyse performance indicators, identify weak areas and drill down to specific indicators to determine the causes of poor performance.
CS-SUNN Programme Officer, Isaac Dare, said the training would enable participants to use the dashboard for structured performance reviews, evidence-based interpretation and timely decision-making.
He said participants would learn to work across the dashboard’s 12 pages, apply filters correctly, interpret performance rankings and bands, understand the underlying indicator logic and adopt a standardised workflow for accurate reporting.
The Permanent Secretary said the success of the exercise would ultimately depend on what happens after the training, particularly how consistently MDAs use the PMS and translate the resulting data into better coordination, budgeting and delivery of nutrition interventions across Kaduna State.
