Building Resilience with Active Countercyclical Expenditures Program

The framework for a program’s data management system should be put in place before its start to measure the achievement of targets and beneficiaries and (the ambitiousness of goals should be balanced against the availability of data and capacity to quickly augment granular data collection. Although the government has increased its focus on gender equality and has made efforts to strengthen gender data tracking, data disaggregated by sex and age of end recipients were often not available at the time of program preparation and monitoring. The challenges in the collection of additional gender, age, demographic, and household recipient data can be partially explained by their unavailability on a level of granularity required by the program’s ambitious goals. This created challenges in gathering sex-disaggregated data from publicly available sources, and the program management unit had to specifically request the information from the line ministries. Further, because the time for preparing quarterly reports coincided with a large-scale administrative reform that directly affected the program’s executing agency, it was not entirely possible to strengthen existing systems for collecting necessary data.