Policy and Planning

Policy and Planning programme contributes to Government’s effortsto generate reliable and timely data to better inform policy and decision making. The programme aims to create an enabling social and economic policy environment that promotes child-centred policy as well as partnerships for sustained realisation of child rights.

This programme component complements the other programme and has three projects: Monitoring and Evaluation, Social and Economic Policy and Communication and Partnerships.

Monitoring and Evaluation

Monitoring and Evaluation are meant to facilitate more effective decision-making, including decisions to improve, reorient or discontinue the programmes or policies by national and international policy makers and funding agencies. UNICEF uses Monitoring and Evaluation approaches to determine whether the country programmes are responsive, and effectively and efficiently respondto issues that affect the most deprived children, as well as to determine the impact and sustainability of equity-based programmes.

Reliable statistical data are key to policy formulation and planning. The Monitoring and Evaluation componentmonitors the situation of children and women and generates data that will be used to inform policies and actions. This includes support tosituation monitoring using the Situation Analysis of Children and Women, Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), TojikInfodatabase system for monitoring progress toward the Millennium Development Goals and the Poverty Reduction Strategy, and tracking the impact of global crises on vulnerable families in Tajikistan.

The Monitoring and Evaluation project facilitates the national monitoring system and the organisation of a database covering essential indicators onchildren that will be available for use by decision-makers, public service managers and civil society organisations at national and district levels. UNICEF supportsthe Agency on Statisticsunder the President of the Republic of Tajikistanto generate country data on economic and social indicators for the regional TransMonee database (www.transmonee.org).TransMonee is proving an increasingly important tool at the national level, bringing together a host of data onchild rights indicators that is not centrally held in any other database in the country.The M&E projectfacilitates collection, analysis and use of data on key social and economic indicators to promote the result-based planning for the needs of children at the district level.

Social and Economic Policy

UNICEF is heavily involved in upstream economic and social policy work and to leverage new partnerships and resources for the fulfilment of children’s rights. The Social and Economic Policy programme concentrates its efforts on: decentralized programme implementation; social policy development; public finance management (PFM) and mid-term expenditure framework (MTEF) reform and social budgeting; social protection; child poverty and disparities; migration, including impacts on children and families. The analytical work conducted by the programmehas underpinned the advocacy efforts of UNICEF on issues related to poverty, vulnerability, social sector policies and expenditures.

Taking into account geographical inequality and inequities, the UNICEF programme strategy in Tajikistan in the current programme cycle emphasizes decentralized programme implementation. In the initial years of implementation of the country programme, a trilateral partnership was established between UNICEF, the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, and twelve priority districts. The objectives of the decentralized approach to programme implementation are threefold:

• Allocate a larger share of UNICEF resources to the district level, boosting capacity development and service delivery for children and women in the most deprived districts and demonstrating a clear results chain, with tangible benefits for the most vulnerable in those districts
• Strengthen district-level planning for development, based on reliable evidence and realistic target setting, resulting in local development plans and budgets that prioritise services for the most deprived children and women and allocate a growing share of the local budget to these services
• Build a strong evidence base on regional disparities in poverty reduction and progress towards theMDGs, which can be used in national policy dialogue and budgeting processes, resulting in national strategies that explicitly address regional inequities and reflect these in budget allocation.

The social and Economic Policy programme expects by the end of the programme cycle to achieve a demonstrable change in key indicators in the priority districts, brought about by stronger local planning processes, better prioritization of locally raised revenue and Central Government allocations to the districts, and the UNICEF contributions in cash and kind. To this effect, UNICEF is making a significant investment in strengthening data collection and analysis, both at national and local levels.

Communications and Partnership

The Communication and Partnership programmeadvocates for children’s rights and is responsible for placing the children’s agenda at the forefront of the national policy dialogue.  This section has recently joined a UNICEF Initiative on Child Right Syllabus, a learning resource for journalism educatorsin universities across the CEE/CIS region,which is recognised as one of the most effective means of supporting a child-friendlymedia. Through the syllabus materials, comprising student and teacher guides as well as new resources developed by individual universities, the project aims to give Tajik journalists an understanding of children’s rights as articulated in the UN Conventionof the Rights of the Child, and develop among professionals news reporting skills that encompass the rights of the children in all matters relating to children’s participation in the media. 

Key strategies of this programme include producing high quality advocacy documents and broad media coverage of child policy, including development and maintenance of the UNICEF Tajikistan website as a knowledge centre on children and research-based development and impact evaluation of IEC materials.  It will be a platform for the use of social media and online channels like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, exploringboth traditional and innovative means of communication and capturingthe breadth and depth of programme information by using available UNICEF resources,ultimately contributing to buildinga society friendly to children,wheretherights of all children are fulfilled.

The Communicationsand Partnership section actively contributes to the work of UN CommunicationGroup in Tajikistan to build a strong partnership with the Government,under a One UN image. Jointly the UNpromoteseight Millennium Development Goals messages to the population of Tajikistan,to advance the policy agenda and to increase targeted allocations to issues benefiting children.

Lastbut not least, the Policy and Planning programme is also responsible for leveraging resources for children from the private sector and the general public, as well as external communication for the country programme.

The overall outcome of the programme is to prioritize children and women’s rights in national policies and plans, based on evidence, participatory planning and monitoring, and to encourage media and civil society partners to leverage resources for children.