ESCWA’s project entitled “Social Expenditure Monitor (SEM) is a pioneering tool for Arab States that provides a comprehensive mapping of public social expenditure to inform budgeting and social policy reforms. The establishment of SEM in a national context would require collection and analysis of data according to an agreed and adapted SEM framework. 

In 2019, the regional SEM framework titled “Social Expenditure Monitor for Arab States: A Tool to Support Budgeting and Fiscal Policy Reform”, in English and Arabic languages, was developed in course of discussion with representatives of Jordan, Tunisia and other Member States, UN agencies, and with inputs from regional and global experts. The framework is aligned with the SDGs, flexible and can be adapted to national specificities.

 

Jordan being one of the project partner countries, the SEM framework has been applied to it to compile data from the government budgets (central) over the period 2010 until the latest years available. As the first stage of implementation of the SEM, national workshop with different ministries/entities of Jordan would help improve the SEM in Jordan national context, methodological issues relating to compilation of data, and it would be an opportunity to discuss preliminary analysis of the data, identify data gaps and solutions and discuss the course of action for moving to other stages of implementation of the SEM.

 

In this context, ESCWA in collaboration with the national coordinators of the project, Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation, Government of Jordan, organized a regional workshop entitled “National Workshop on mapping data for SEM from public budgets of Jordan” which was virtually held on September 28-29-30, 2020.  The aim of the meeting with representatives of Jordan was to discuss the indicators of SEM in Jordanian context, data compilation methodology and preliminary analysis of SEM of Jordan as well as identify data gaps and explore possible disaggregation of data sources/methods. 

 
The workshop was attended by representatives of several Jordan’s governmental ministries and entities, the project team working on the Social Expenditure Monitor from ESCWA, and the UNCT nominations from UNRCO, Jordan.