sahr2001 - Health Systems Trust

8 • HIV/AIDS Financing
Provincial units make use of a number of resource mobilisation and
management tools, such as strategic plans, business plans, activity budgets
and financial reports.
Except in the case of Gauteng, provinces do not have discursive documents
explaining their strategies, although sometimes they describe their individual
activities in explanatory documents.
Business plans that exist at various levels are the best way to glean a unit’s
strategic responses. A number of provinces have unit-wide business or
operational plans but some of these are deficient; only Gauteng appears to
have a usable business plan.
For strategic and project planning, as well as management and reporting,
units generally use some kind of activity budget related to their business
plans. Deficiencies in business plans are naturally passed onto their associated
budgets. At the time of study, Gauteng was the only province with a
comprehensive, functional activity budget.
The formal financial management used by provinces is structured, with local
variations, in terms of the following hierarchical categories, with each one
wholly containing the next:
◆ Responsibility code which refers to the programme or the main
structure in which HIV/AIDS unit budget is located e.g. District Health
◆ Objective code which refers to the utilisation of funds within a
Programme e.g. for HIV/AIDS Support
◆ Standard or Economic Classification Line Item
◆ Posting Items which are sub categories of Standard Items.
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