1. Costing of Nutrition: Program
Experience Approach
Jakub Kakietek, PhD
World Bank, Washington DC
Presentation for the SUN Workshop on Costing
and Financial Tracking of Nutrition
Guatemala, April 2015
1
3. 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
4. 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
5. 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
6. 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
7. 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
8. Program Experience: : Example
Vitamin A supplementation during community-based
campaigns
Cost information provided by UNICEF
[see example Excel spreadsheet]
9. 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