Food security and nutrition programma in 6 districts of Gaza province: local Development Financing

IMPACT: Improved food security and nutrition of vulnerable households in 6 districts in Gaza province UNCDF Local Development mandate is pivoted around facilitating the development public expenditure management systems (PEMS) that address participatory and gender equitable planning, budgeting, procurement and contracting, financial management and auditing, monitoring and evaluation at local government levels. Once basic decentralized structures and systems and fiscal transfer systems are in place, special purpose for the LDF may be set up for specific objectives, i.e. Local Economic Development (LED), sustainable food and nutritional security (SFNS), climate change adaptation (CCA) and/ or social protection (SP) and with the notice that referred themes are partly interrelated and overlapping -meaning there could be tapped into programmatic synergies through their integration. Under the FSNP, UNCDF will provide the following support: a) Strategic support to improved LG systems and structures for harmonized and improved decentralized governance for food and nutritional security. b) Support to set up a LDF that could provide for or partly contribute to capital investments in sustainable socio-economic infrastructures that are critical for food security. The districts in the interior of Gaza province are among the districts at national level with the largest challenges in terms of sustainable food and nutritional security . Following factors do contribute to a lack of SFNS : a. Relatively poor agro-ecological conditions in combination with a dominant reliance on rain fed subsistence farming by the majority of the population b. Demographics, environment, access to and control over land, family planning and social service constraints in remote areas c. Weak or absent socio-economic infrastructures and weak social and economic support structures and services for integrated food and income systems and inclusive local economic development. d. Limited human, social, organizational and institutional capital assets e. Relatively high prevalence of HIV-AIDS and limited access to ARVs affecting both the labour capacities at household level and specific requirements of PLWHA in terms of their need for sufficient and nutritional food f. Socio-cultural resistance to non-traditional crops, food products and new diets and lack of a support structures to support the promotion and introduction of alternative and improved food and diet options. g. Persistent gender inequalities and a large number of vulnerable female or child headed households with many men having moved out of the area and working as migrant labourers, predominantly in South Africa and Maputo. h. Weakly developed social protection systems and without economic rationale; beyond food relief and feeding programs. i. Insufficient anticipation on the complexity of social change processes. j. Policy dimensions and challenges of multi-disciplinary themes k. The context of regional integration and global dimensions in terms of food and input markets – high and fluctuating prices -, local foot print of global agri-food-fuel-‘conservation’ systems and, as related, multi-scale competing claims on land, etc

Outcome 1: Local Public Expenditure Management in 6 Districts in Northern Gaza Province contributes to increased sustainable food and nutritional security. Outcome 2:National policies are informed by the experiences of integrating sustainable food and nutritional security into local Public Expenditure Management.