Nutrition Specialist (Public Finance for Nutrition)

LonAdd HR Consultancy Plc (www.lonadd.com) is a Recruitment & Outsourcing Company based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with branch offices in Dukem and Hawassa. We are looking to recruit a qualified applicant on behalf of our client.

Background 

Ethiopia launched the National Food and Nutrition Policy in 2018 and a ten-year costed Food and Nutrition Strategy (2021-2030), a whole-of-government multisectoral program committed by nine ministries and an estimated USD 2.55 billion over ten years. There is also Seqota Declaration Road map to end child stunting among children under the age of 2 by 2030 and the Food System Transformation Roadmap. However, in the current public finance practice, resources are allocated for a particular ministry and/or agency in line with their given mandates, creating a challenge to allocate and track nutrition expenditures across different sectors. Therefore, Client is supporting the government in designing the nutrition budget and expenditure tagging and tracking system to track nutrition-related expenditures, consolidate spending data nationally, strengthen collaboration between planning and budgeting priority interventions, and improve linkages between policy objectives, activities, outputs, and outcomes.

Rational/Justification

Budget tagging and tracking are measures that help national governments improve expenditure information on specific themes, potentially supporting more informed allocation decisions. This means that tagging must be institutionalized in such a manner that it can inform and influence decision-making. The proposed Nutrition Budget and Expenditure Tagging and Tracking (NBETT) for Ethiopia has two objectives: (i) to analyze the level and composition of government and donor spending on Nutrition in any given fiscal year by enabling identification, tracking, and reporting of nutrition-related expenditure; and (ii) provide evidence to strengthen institutions and public financial management arrangements to better serve nutrition needs. 

Scope of the Assignment 

The Nutrition  Specialist is responsible for providing technical assistance to coordinate and provide programmatic support for the implementation of the multisectoral nutrition budget tagging and tracking system to institutionalize a system of tagging public budgets and expenditures to identify nutrition-related expenditures, and to support nutrition-informed planning and financing strategy for the country,  to track the amount of public financing spent on nutrition-related interventions to ensure that existing funding is being spent efficiently and in line with the government's defined priority areas as well as advocacy for innovative domestic financing to increase public financing for Nutrition.

Main Job Duties and Responsibilities

Programmatic support on the development of nutrition budget and expenditure tagging and tracking (NBETT) system to federal sectors. 

• Support the preparation of a methodology for identifying, classifying, weighting and marking relevant types of expenditure. 
• Provide support and facilitate piloting the methodology using selected ministries.
•  Supported and facilitated the preparation of the Federal Government Nutrition budget and expenditure tagging and tracking system user manual.
• Providing assistance to different sectors to tag their projects and activities using the IFMIS system. 
• Support and facilitate benchmarking other countries on tagging and tracking nutrition budgets and expenditures.
•  Building capacities of different sector experts and IFMIS IT professionals to strengthen IFMIS capacities to tag and track crosscutting issues.
• Providing training to different sectors in the first stage to implement nutrition budget and expenditure tagging and tracking at the federal level.
• Supporting different ministries in mainstreaming Nutrition budget and expenditure information into the Budget allocation, Budget reports, Budget speech, and Fiscal Policy Flagship reports
• Facilitate awareness creation forums and advocacy workshops to increase public financing for Nutrition.  
• Sharing experience through using different communication platforms. 
• Support the mobilization of innovative domestic financing. 
• Support and monitor the functioning of the Food and Nutrition Multisectoral Coordination mechanism at all levels, annual multisectoral nutrition planning, budget allocation, reviewing of progress, and reporting. 

Support customization of nutrition tagging and tracking with the appropriate regional government financial information system. 

• Preparing a methodology for identifying, classifying, weighting, and marking relevant types of expenditure within a regional government budget system but in line with the federal system (this may require if the tracking system is different from the federal system)
• Piloting the methodology using selected regional government and regional bureaus 
• Preparing business requirements to integrate Nutrition tagging into the regional government chart of accounts.
• Preparing regional government Nutrition tagging and tracking user manual
• Providing training to regional governments to implement NBETT at the regional level. 
• Supporting regional governments' Bureau of Finance in mainstreaming Nutrition budget and expenditure information into the Budget allocation, Budget reports, Budget speech and Fiscal Policy Flagship reports 
• Support customizing the nutrition tagging and tracking system into the Aid Management Information System.
•  Support the preparation of a methodology for tracking channel 3 nutrition-related expenditures using the Aid Management System.
• Support for the preparation of business requirements to integrate nutrition budget and expenditure tagging into the system.
• Provide support for the integration process of nutrition budget and expenditure tagging into the system.
•  Support for the preparation of country-level nutrition expenditure report.
• Facilitate advocacy events to increase nutrition financing.

Deliverables

Deliverables includes report of Methodology designed for federal regional and Aid Training guide, training reports of the sector ministers, report on budget tagging system in place at federal, regional and aid management system, Budget briefs and Advocacy workshop proceedings   and Final report.