Maseru, April 22 — The criticality of having a premeditated approach to financial planning that organises expenditures around specific programmes is vital in attaining intended objectives, goals and results.
This is appreciated and demonstrated by the 2026/27 Fiscal Year Budget appearing to be a programme based budgeting, with some experts alluding to this type of budget as one that has a potential of producing long term results as opposed to short term ones.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) expert in issues of public finance for children, Dr. Bob Muchabaiwa sees this approach as one that is also valuable for the purposes of maximising impact while maintaining fiscal responsibility and ensuring that tracking budget becomes easier.
According to the expert, this type of a budget goes beyond traditional line item budgeting by amongst others linking spending with strategic goals, gauging effectiveness of each programme in attaining those desired outcomes.
“Lesotho is in the right direction in terms of achieving the envisioned outcomes, what is left is for the media as the watchdog to go beyond reporting budget speech as articulated on budget day, but to probe further the budget processes from preparation stage to implementation stage” he said.
This, Dr. Muchabaiwa highlighted, will help the government not only to be held accountable, but also to monitor progress and challenges for the purposes of developing the country economically and otherwise.
In another story, the issue of having a specific budget for a specific agenda was stressed during the Early Childhood Care and Development (ECCD) School Readiness Initiative (SRI) launch last week.
Stakeholders including the Education Minister stressed the importance of having a specific budget for this particular sector as a form of investment to early education for sustainability of ECCD.
Dr. Muchabaiwa holds PhD in Development Studies with the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
He focuses on the political economy of public spending on child protection in selected African states as per his study.
He has over 15 years working experience at the regional level focusing on children’s rights as well as social and economic policy.
ENDS/AM/tl
