This brief reviews Senegal’s central government budget allocations and expenditure in six sectors that relate to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and examines budget credibility trends in each sector. The six sectors analyzed are agriculture (SDG 2), education (SDG 4), environment (SDGs 13, 14 and 15), health (SDG 3), gender (SDG 5) and social protection (SDGs 1 and 10).
This brief finds that SDG trends in Senegal are improving although the country remains below the minimum progress required to achieve the SDGs by 2030. In fact, in all the above-mentioned sectors, major challenges remain, with sanitation facing the most significant challenges. Significant underspending occurred in all sectors except education, which had overspending of 4 percent against the approved budget in 2018. This raises the question of budget credibility, as the country consistently deviates from its approved budget and, often, deviations are greater than the 10 percent limit for individual ministry line items.
Key recommendations:
To improve performance on SDG achievement and budget credibility, we recommend (i) government undertake capacity building for public service managers on the country’s program budget, (ii) better study budget execution rates, (iii) encourage greater involvement of local authorities, (iv) implement gender responsive budgeting and (v) ensure access to timely budget information and data. Better access to information could help actors with a direct stake in SDG achievement make informed decisions and shift strategies towards improved services.
This publication is a part of Connecting Budget Credibility to the Sustainable Development Goals.