In order to keep the country in track with the sustainable development targets (SDGs), the government should significantly increase budgetary allocation in health, education, child health, safety net issues in the budget for 2019-20. Save the Children has said this while making recommendations about child protection and development keeping the National Budget (201-20-20) ahead.
The representatives of Save the Children presented these recommendations at a press conference organised at the National Press Club in Dhaka on Thursday.
The last national budget for 2018-19 was given in the context of a 5.5 million out-of-school children in the country, poor quality of education, high under five mortality rate, low access to health and education services for children with disabilities, increasing violence against children, child marriage, and so on.
The budget tried to address some of these concerns. Funds were allocated for more schools, disabled friendly infrastructure initiative, strengthened safety net programme for children with disability, etc. But on the other hand, there was decreased share of social sector allocations in the budget. Declined share of health and education allocations concerned all the most.
The child rights context remains the same for the upcoming budget for the year 2019-20, but with greater financial capacity of the government to respond. As media reports suggest, we are going to have a budget of over 5 trillion this year, which will be about 11 percent larger than the previous one. Given the child rights context and the need of the children, Save the Children recommends the following measures for consideration in the upcoming budget for 2019-20.
Health budget as a portion of the total budget is declining. This is a major concern that needs to be addressed. Health budget declined from 5.2 percent in FY2017-18 to 5.0 percent in FY2018-19.
With achievements in reducing mortality rate, health budget needs to focus on improved nutritional status, particularly at early ages. Mid-day meal at schools is a great tool in this regard and Save the Children recommends greater coverage in the budget for 2019-20, especially in the disadvantage regions. Health budget needs to address geographic pockets of malnutrition. It needs to be kept in mind that these pockets are not merely poverty induced.
Education budget is stagnating and is declining from FY2017-18 to FY2018-19 as a percentage of total budget and now stands at 11.4 percent only against the UNESCO suggested level of 20 percent. Given the 7th FYP considers human resources as the main pillar of development, more budget allocation is needed. Save the Children calls for progressive budgetary measures to reach the UNESCO suggested level of education budget by 2025, which implies 1.5 percentage points improvement every year on a cumulative basis.
Education focused on quantitative improvements in the past years. More investment is now needed to improve quality of education. Libraries, multimedia classrooms, teacher training should be the major focus, suggests Save the Children adding that particular education investment is needed to prepare infrastructure in support of preschool activities and strengthened technical and vocational education.
Establishment of Directorate for Children under the ministry of Women and Children Affairs need to be facilitated in this budget through preparatory and setup allocation. Safety net budget is a major concern. Last FYP as well as the current one seeks to improve safety net budget from around 2 percent to around 3 percent of GDP. This implies not much improvement happened in between as the budget for 2018-19 targeted safety net allocations of 2.5 percent of GDP only, with just one year remaining for the current FYP period, Save the Children mentioned.
Specific Safety Net scheme for Children needs to be introduced for poor and vulnerable children so that the problems of school dropout, unsafe migration, child labour, children of sex worker and street children can be prevented addressing the root causes. Safety net allocation for children with disability needs to be further increased, it also said.
The coverage of mid-day meal programme needs to be enhanced to include all schools, particularly in remote and lagging regions. Safety net programme need to be introduced targeting children living in brothels to address drop out from school. Remote and economically weak zones like coastal belts, chars, haors, slums, hilly areas, which are deprived of basic services needs to be prioritized in social sector allocations.
Children Act 2013 requires significant human resource and programming investments that there is no commitment from the government for this. The budget for the coming year should include provisions to address the issue. The Act mentions that children aged over 4 years will not stay in the brothel. However, alternative arrangement has not been planned and funded for that.
Action Plan on reducing child marriage is not calculated and has no budgetary allocations. This needs to be addressed on a priority basis to expedite implementation, Save the Children added. Violence against children including rape, killing, and sexual harassment has become a major issue in the country. Specific measures need to be taken with proper financial support through the budget. Child protection system of the country needs to be strengthened. Strengthening the relevant committees of the local governments and establishment of the Child Rights Commission needs budgetary measures, it added.
SDG action plan to eliminate hazardous child labour need to be spent annually targeting the 38 hazardous sectors.
“We need to continue our good efforts on the child budget. In order to promote transparency, the child budget should facilitate resource planning linked to policies and priorities,” it added. Detail expenditure plan and implementation status of child budget should be made public. Development of child budget needs broader participation of all relevant groups including that of children.
Good efforts on a district budget may be reintroduced to show geographic distribution of resources and how they address geographic deprivations. As a first step, social sector allocations may be mapped geographically in the budget, including coverages and allocations for safety net programmes. A result based accountability system may be introduced to improve budget implementation. A reward mechanism may be drawn for timely and quality implementation of programmes.