Breakthrough RESEARCH Legacy Area: Costing and Cost-effectiveness of Social and Behavior Change

Breakthrough RESEARCH has worked to gather, analyze, and share evidence on the costs and impacts of SBC interventions, making the case that investing in SBC is crucial for improving health, including family planning outcomes. Costing is the process of collecting data from various sources and analyzing it to estimate the cost of a health program or intervention. Potential sources of cost information depend on the purpose of the costing and the quality of the available sources and may include budgets, program payroll and purchasing records, interviews, or market prices. High-quality cost data are important for budgeting, planning, evaluating, priority-setting, efficiency and impact analyses, and advocacy. Investment in SBC costing efforts can reap dividends by improving the use of limited resources and optimizing SBC interventions to change health behaviors and increase uptake of services.

Breakthrough RESEARCH’s approach to SBC costing has been guided by three grounding pillars: first, synthesize the existing evidence. This has included reviews of the literature related to both costs of SBC approaches and the documented health impact of SBC on a number of outcomes, including family planning, malaria, and nutrition. Second, generate new evidence to fill identified costing and cost-effectiveness evidence gaps. This has included the project’s cost-effectiveness analyses of two large integrated SBC programs, one in Niger, and one in Nigeria.  And the third guiding pillar has been to foster evidence generation by others. We’ve done this by connecting the community working on or interested in SBC costing and by developing resources and tools to support implementing partners.