Overtime, the government of Uganda has made significant investment in child centric sectors such as education, health, WASH and social development. This has led to an improvement in performance of key child indicators. Despite this investment, a larger portion of the development budget for key sectors such as health and social protection is largely financed by development partners, which has serious implications on the sustainability of the initiatives being implemented. For instance, 83% of the FY 2024/25 health development budget is projected to come from development partners.

In FY 2024/25, the Ministry of Health lifted the ban on recruitment of staff in the health sector. Inspite of this initiative, the budget for wage for districts such as Amuru for FY 202/25 is projected to decrease by 20.3%, implying that no additional wage has been provided to the district to cater for recruitment of staff to fill vacant positions as well as the new staffing norms recently approved by Parliament.in districts such as Kotido that have received a 67.3% increment in the wage for the health budget, no progess has been made in recruitment of additional health workers in facilities such as Kotido hospital, evidenced by the fact that no adverts have been made (to-date) by the district for the vacant positions.

A big chunk of the resources for most child centric sectors are spent at the central government level, leaving LGs (where the bulk of services are implemented) with very little. For instance, in FY 2023/24, up to 93% of the social protection resources were spent by MGLSD, while LGs spent a mere 2%. Similarly, 89% of the WASH budget for FY 2023/24 was spent by Ministry of Water and Environment)

Uganda’s spending on social protection as a proportion of GDP was estimated at 0.17% in FY2023/24, which is less than the average for Lower Middle Income countries, which places the country among the lowest spenders in this category.

At LG level, funding for key child related intervention is mainly financed from external support and most of the expenditures are recurrent in nature. For instance, Nabilatuk’s development budget under the community-based services department is all funded by development partners. In Amuru district, in FY 2024/25, UGX165,628,000 was allocated towards child health service es all of which is to be spent on travel inland

In FY 2024/25, the Ministry of Health lifted the ban on recruitment of staff in the health sector. Inspite of this initiative, the wage components for most district health budgets are projected to decline in FY 2024/25, which casts doubt on the possibility of recruitment of additional health staff to fill the existing gaps. For instance, the Amuru health wage budget for FY 202/25 is projected to decrease by 20.3%, Nabilatuk by 1.8% and Nakapiripit by 8.4%,

In all the districts under review, the special needs education budget is one of the least funded components in the education budget and all districts are projected to receive a uniform figure of  UGX 3million, inspite of the disparities in the actual number of children with special needs. The allocation is less than 0.5% of the district education budget.