Costing of Nutrition: Program

Experience Approach

Jakub Kakietek, PhDWorld Bank, Washington DC

Presentation for the SUN Workshop on Costing

and Financial Tracking of Nutrition

Guatemala, April 2015

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Approaches to Costing

“Ingredients

approach”

“Program

experience

approach”

(Positive costing)

(Normative costing) Estimating the cost

of what should be

Estimating the cost

of what is

Ingredients Appraoch

What should be implemented?

What elements (ingredients) the intervention should include? Intervention “building blocks”

How many of each ingredient is needed?

How much each ingredient costs?

Cost=ingredients*quantity*unit cost

E.g. Bhutta et al., Lancet 2013

Program Experience

What is implemented?

What are the cost of the interventions that are currently being delivered?

How much it costs to deliver the intervention to one person?

How many persons will be targeted

Unit cost=total expenditure/number of persons served

Sale-up cost=unit costs*number of persons targeted

E.g. World Bank 2010

Program Experience: How To

Where do cost data come from? Program expenditure data (ideally) Program budgets Published studies

Who provides the data? Governmental agencies Implementing partners (e.g. UN agencies, NGOs) Donors Academics

Program Experience: Advantages

Costs are based on real life programs (e.g. program expenditure data, program budget data)

Past costs incurred are a reasonable approximation of the expected future costs Unlike positive costing, it includes inefficiencies in

program delivery Those will likely be encountered during future

program delivery

(Possibly) better for planning and budgeting

Program Experience: Challenges

Requires quality information on unit cost (cost per beneficiary) Data collection (at least initially) is needed Data collection may be challenging

But, data on unit cost should be available (and used) as part of program management

Data collection may be lengthy

Programs/interventions need to already be implemented somewhere in the country Better for estimating the cost of scale up then for

estimating the cost of completely new programs/interventions

Program Experience: : Example

Vitamin A supplementation during community-based campaigns

Cost information provided by UNICEF

[see example Excel spreadsheet]

Year 1 Year 2 Year N

Why Cost?

Needs to be an essential element of: Ongoing financial management Ongoing program management to achieve results

Outcomes and Impact

Cost

Allocations

Expenditure

Funding gaps

Mobili-zation

Cost

Allocations

Expenditure

Funding gaps

Mobili-zation

Cost

Allocations

Expenditure

Funding gaps

Mobili-zation

THANK YOU

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