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
1
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