Center for Economics & Costing

The Center for Economics & Costing is a leader in generating, analyzing, and using cost and financing data to inform health policy and planning, and performing economic evaluations. We have implemented primary costing activities across a wide range of health services, including PrEP, VMMC, ART, family planning, TB, and social and behavior change (SBC) interventions.

The cost and financing data generated by the center is used by stakeholders to inform decision making and increase program efficiency and impact. The team applies both traditional costing approaches and an activity-based costing and management (ABC/M) approach to generate primary cost data on the delivery of health services to better understand cost drivers and improve the efficient allocation of resources. The center’s contribution to costing aspects of tools such as the OneHealth and IntegratedHealth Tools assist program planners in understanding and budgeting for the inputs needed to achieve program goals. In addition, the team supports harmonization, verification, and tracking of budget and expenditure data across funding sources, and synthesizes and analyzes related program and macroeconomic data, to inform program and sustainability planning at the country level.

Our holistic approach comprises synthesizing the existing evidence, generating new evidence to fill identified costing and cost-effectiveness evidence gaps, and fostering increased data use by developing resources and tools to support both the collection and use of cost data.

Key areas of expertise include:

  • Economic evaluations, including cost-effectiveness analyses and benefit-cost analyses
  • Costing of national and decentralized health programs
  • Primary Data collection to fill data gaps, including Activity-based Costing and Management
  • Analysis of markets and approximation of potential markets
  • Literature syntheses and data analyses
  • Estimation of complex indicators
  • Capacity-building activities and resources to increase technical knowledge and strengthen use of data for efficiency and accountability, including program planning and budgeting
  • Investment case studies
  • Creation of online repositories for cost information

Partnerships for Impact

The Center for Economics & Costing collaborates with a diverse range of partners, including:

  • Multilateral Organizations: Global Fund, UNAIDS, WHO, UN Interagency Working Group
  • Donors: USAID, PEPFAR
  • Country Governments: Ministries of Health, Finance, Planning, etc. focusing on health areas of FP, RMNCAH, HIV, TB, and NCDs, among others
  • Regional & Global Initiatives: Global Health Cost Consortium, Resource Alignment for HIV Collaboration, Interagency Working Group on Costing

Signature Tools

  • Online repositories for cost information: Unit Cost Study Repository, FP Unit Cost Database
  • Online dashboard displaying resource alignment data for sustainability planning
  • Other tools and analyses developed include:
    • Tool to help design differentiated care model programs for ART
    • Tool to display aligned resources across PEPFAR, Global Fund, Domestic governments, and other funders in HIV
    • The costing module in PrEP-it, a tool for PrEP implementation planning, monitoring and evaluation
    • Tool for sustainability planning to evaluate the trade-offs between changing costs, funders, and epidemiological patterns
    • Business cases for social and behavior change for family planning, malaria, and maternal and child health
    • Analyses using cost, expenditure and beneficiary data for key population and general population outreach programs.