How are national budget funds put to use in Southern Africa? (Part 1)

With the African Development Bank recently estimating that African countries have a financing gap of over US$400bn. With this limited funding in mind, it’s imperative that the few resources that African states have are allocated in a manner that makes sense. 

That’s where national budgets come in. These are a critical tool for addressing the funding gaps and other social (think subsidising housing) and economic (think infrastructure projects that create jobs) issues. Given the recent budget announcements in Zambia and Zimbabwe, we figured it would be worth tracking how budgets are being allocated by Southern African countries. 

For the first article in this series, we’ll look at the present budget allocations for 5 countries and then another 5 in a follow up, before publishing a final piece that explores the historic trends of budget allocations in key areas such as education, health and infrastructure…

How countries are allocating national budgets (at present)

For the countries covered below we identified the top 10 government departments getting the bulk of funding (with over 80% budget share going to these) and because a picture tells a thousand words there won’t be much in the way of narrative unless there’s an anomaly that needs explaining.