Save the Children
Save the Children endorses the ATI objectives of the Addis Tax Initiative and has joined the Addis Tax Initiative as a supporting organisation.
Save the Children acknowledge that achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and achieving better outcomes for the world’s most vulnerable children will require increasing funding to social programs through domestic resource mobilisation. They explicitly call on governments, international donors and development partners to strengthen domestic and international tax systems in order to help developing country governments to increase their tax revenue. Save the Children recognise that increasing and sustaining public finance is key to fulfilling the SDG pledge to Leave No One Behind.
Save the Children is focused on increasing public participation in subnational tax policy development through civil society engagement. Their team works in two counties in Kenya – Bungoma and Wajir - with networks of local civil society and grassroots organisations dedicated to effective social service delivery and children’s rights. They work with CSOs to survey community members and develop tax proposals and memoranda to engage with the county governments to influence the Finance Bills and County Fiscal Strategy Papers to create fair and equitable tax policies. In the United States, they advocate with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to lead a whole of government DRM strategy that promotes pro-poor and equitable tax policies and finances local civil society participation in budget monitoring and tax policy development. Through this partnership Save the Children advocates strongly for aid effectiveness principles of country ownership, transparency, and fairness related to DRM and fiscal policy.
In the last two years, Save the Children has helped to increase the capacity of local communities in Kenya in Bungoma and Wajir to monitor and analyse tax policy and engage with county officials. This increased capacity has resulted in stronger DRM frameworks and more equitable tax proposals.
During the 2020 pandemic response, they are working to ensure that Kenya county governments across the country are effectively and appropriately apportioning their emergency budgets with the input of civil society. So far, the governments in Bungoma and Wajir have disclosed the top-line numbers of their COVID-19 response budgets. This demonstrates the impact Save the Children has had over the past few years since in previous years budget information in emergencies was not shared.
