Final Reports of Technical Review of Costing Tools

Abstract

An effective strategy for meeting the MDGs requires an assessment of which effective interventions are available and are appropriate to meet the target, taking also into account issues involving infrastructure, human resources, and financing. Costing tools can be a powerful tool for countries to use to estimate the costs of specific health actions. While all costing tools somehow address the issue of resource needs associated with specific actions, each tool has a different logic and approach. To assist countries in the use of costing tools, several international development partners are conducting a review of 13 costing tools relevant to the health MDGs. This technical review is one aspect of this project. This part of the study will (i) identify the questions each tool is designed to answer; (ii) describe the tools’ input requirements; (iii) analyze the tools’ outputs; and (iv) critically examine the tools’ methods and underlying assumptions. Key to the study is the assessment we will make of the extent to which each costing tool appropriately answers the question(s) it was designed to address.