Total expenditure on children in the Jamaican budget has not increased significantly over the last five years, according to a trend analysis by the Social Investment for Children Initiative (SICI).

According to 'A Review of Social and Economic Investments for Jamaican Children', Jamaica has maintained relatively high levels of recurrent expenditure on social services - despite slow economic growth and a massive debt burden - but needs to focus more on ensuring that resources for children are adequately allocated and efficiently spent.

The report contains an analysis of expenditure on services and programmes for children for the fiscal period 2003/04 (actual), 2004/05 (revised) and 2005/06 (approved), conducted by Dr Michael Witter, former professor of economics at the University of the West Indies.

The SICI group supplemented these findings with an analysis of the 2005/06 (actual) 2006/07 (revised) and 2007/08 (approved) fiscal years.

For the three-year period of his review, Witter estimated that expenditure on children made up 16 to 17 per cent of recurrent expenditure on social services and one per cent of capital expenditure - overall roughly 10 per cent of the government's total expenditure, or six per cent of the nation's Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

A slight increase

The more current SICI analysis revealed a slight increase to 18 per cent of recurrent expenditure on children for 2006/07, representing 12 per cent of total expenditure. This was followed, however, by a decline in 2007/08 to 17 per cent of recurrent expenditure, representing 10 per cent of total expenditure.

Both sets of data are fairly crude estimates, based on Government spending on programmes in the areas of health, education, social protection, culture and sports that benefit children directly, as well as indirectly through benefits to women in their role as caregivers.

Together they show that investment in children has remained fairly stagnant over the last five years.

The SICI report indicates that the lion's share of expenditure for children goes to education, followed by health. In the approved budget for 2005/06, close to 18 per cent of the education recurrent budget was spent on tertiary education. Early childhood education, however, received only a little more than four per cent.

UNICEF has long advocated for the devotion of more resources to early childhood development and education, based on strong evidence that investment in these critical formative years yields significantly high social and economic returns and greater equity.