Leveraging Gen-AI for budget tagging on children rights in Indonesia
About
Indonesia has established strong legal and policy frameworks to protect children's rights, yet the absence of standardized approaches to tracking child-related spending has created persistent challenges in evaluating programme effectiveness, efficiency, and equity. This gap is especially pronounced at the local government level, where the majority of child-related public services are delivered. While Indonesia's budgeting system incorporates participatory elements through Musrenbang development planning forums and has successfully applied thematic budget tagging in areas such as climate change and nutrition, no comprehensive mechanism exists for tracking child-related expenditures systematically. Previous efforts — including UNICEF's Budget Analysis for Children — provided valuable insights, but have yet to establish an institutionalized, government-wide approach to identifying and monitoring child-focused spending.
This study aims to address Indonesia’s critical need for systematic tracking of child-related public expenditures by developing an innovative AI-powered budget tagging methodology, combining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Child-Friendly City frameworks with expert validation. Applied to local government budgets across Indonesia's social sectors, the approach identified more than 1,500 child-related sub-activities spanning domains from health and education to social protection. This comprehensive mapping provides unprecedented visibility into public investment in children's welfare and establishes a practical foundation for evidence-based policy decisions.
