The activity was conducted in order to develop a roadmap for 2025/26 budget related activities, to orient children and CSOs on how to do a child friendly budget analysisandanalyze the 2025/26 national budget
As part of capacity building and ensuring that the analysis is child centered, 4 children from Lilongwe and Mzimba took part during the analysis process that also helped CSOs in prioritizing the issues and key messages for advocacy.
A total of 11 themes prioritized were identified by CSOs and children: these are child protection, Gender, disability, WASH, Social Protection, ECD, Education, Nutrition, Primary Health care, Climate change and Revenue, out of the 11 themes CSOs selected Basic education, Gender, Disability and ECD to be presented during the engagement with the parliamentary committee of social and community affairs.
The joint budget analysis activity had 30 participants (20 Male, 6 Females, 2 Boys and 2 Girls) who actively took part in analyzing the budget
During the analysis process some of the gaps identified are Updated children population: The total number of children population is not updated and not known which made it difficult for CSOs to deeply analyze the allocation of budget amount versus per child.
Absence of council budgets: during the analysis the budgets for district councils were not available.
The information was not easy to find as some programmes budgets line were not available in the budget’s documents for example the students loans budget line