How Senegal is ensuring money for food and health gets where it's needed most
28 January 2026
The public financial management (PFM) team at Genesis has been tasked to assist an important reform in Senegal: The design and operationalisation of a nutrition tag (a simple label attached to specific budget lines) through the new integrated financial management system, SIGIF
This crucial work, commissioned by the country’s National Council for Development of Nutrition (CNDN) with support from the World Bank, the Global Financing Facility (GFF) and Expertise France, directly addresses the nation’s pressing nutrition challenges. It’s a fundamental shift towards results-based governance, where every CFA Franc allocated to nutrition can be tracked, ensuring financial commitments translate into tangible human development outcomes.
The first phase of our engagement involved a feasibility study. The Genesis team’s assessment highlighted that while Senegal possesses a good legal, institutional, and technical framework for public finance, its potential for strategic nutrition budgeting remained untapped because of the absence of a formal budget tracking system.
To bridge this gap, we facilitated a collaborative learning process. This involved multi-country capacity building workshops for peer learning, a high-level workshop with key stakeholders from the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Health, and other line ministries for consultations.
In these sessions, our team presented case studies from countries like Rwanda, Nigeria and Ethiopia which have recently successfully implemented a similar reform. This comparative analysis allowed Senegalese officials to interrogate different models, assessing their strengths and weaknesses within the unique context of their own administrative systems, ultimately building consensus around the most effective path forward.
The Genesis team is now coordinating the design of the tag to align with the functionalities of Senegal's new Financial Management Information System (SIGIF).
This work led to the co-development of a nutrition taxonomy, a system that identifies nutrition-specific, nutrition-sensitive, and indirect nutrition expenditures across multiple sectors.
This intervention is critical. Despite strong commitment toward improving nutrition outcomes, the government of Senegal has historically faced challenges in budgeting and allocating resources to nutrition. This stagnation has profound long-term consequences. Chronic malnutrition, particularly stunting, not only represents a public health crisis but also erodes human capital, impacting cognitive development, educational attainment, and future economic productivity.
Once tested and validated, the system that is being co-developed will equip the government of Senegal with the fiscal intelligence to interpret expenditure information alongside performance and outcome data.
Armed with this data, policymakers will be able to answer critical questions for the first time: Is funding reaching the regions with the highest stunting rates? Are allocations for preventative interventions adequate compared to curative services?
This level of fiscal intelligence allows for a dynamic, evidence-based approach to policy, shifting the budget cycle from a static annual exercise to a responsive management tool. It moves the conversation from 'how much did we spend?' to 'what impact did we achieve with our spending?' - a hallmark of modern, effective governance and the central aim of Genesis’s PFM engagements.