There is a saying often attributed to civil society advocates: show me your budget and I will show you your values. For those working on early childhood justice, public finance analysis is not merely an economic exercise — it is a human rights methodology.
The Committee on the Rights of the Child has long held that states must allocate "to the maximum extent of available resources" to realise children's rights. But this obligation is meaningless without the tools to measure whether it is being met. Budget tracking, expenditure analysis, and fiscal incidence studies are essential instruments for holding governments accountable to their legal commitments.
The Data Problem
One of the first challenges we encounter in early childhood budget work is the problem of disaggregation. Most government budgets are organised by sector — health, education, social protection — rather than by beneficiary age group. This means that expenditures reaching young children are often invisible within broader sectoral allocations.
A ministry of health budget line for immunisation, for example, does not tell us how much of that expenditure reaches children under five versus other age groups. An education budget that includes pre-primary spending may bury that figure within a combined figure that makes comparison across years or countries impossible.
CECJ's approach involves three steps: mapping the legal obligations that create spending duties; identifying the budget lines through which those obligations should be discharged; and tracking actual expenditures against both the legal standard and stated programmatic commitments.
What We Find
Across the countries we have studied, early childhood services are consistently underfunded relative to both legal obligations and stated policy commitments. Pre-primary education routinely receives less than two percent of national education budgets, despite accounting for a critical developmental period. Integrated child development services — combining nutrition, stimulation, and care — are often funded through donor grants rather than domestic revenue, creating fragility and unpredictability.
We also find significant disparities between urban and rural expenditure, with children in rural areas — who are already more likely to face poverty and limited access to services — receiving a disproportionately small share of early childhood public spending.
From Analysis to Accountability
Budget analysis only creates accountability if it is connected to advocacy. CECJ shares its findings with parliamentary budget committees, with civil society coalitions, and with the media. We support communities to understand and engage with budget processes. And we contribute budget data to universal periodic review submissions and treaty body reporting, ensuring that fiscal accountability is part of the international human rights conversation about early childhood.
The goal is not simply to criticise government spending decisions. It is to build the evidence base for better ones — and to ensure that the legal obligations states have accepted translate into real resource flows that reach the children they are meant to protect.