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.

Related Virtual Event

Costing for Family Planning Social and Behavior Change

19 April 2023

Materials related to the webinar

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Foundations for Costing for SBC

Synthesize Existing Evidence

Family Planning

Malaria

Nutrition

Generate New Evidence

Foster Evidence Generation by Others

Breakthrough RESEARCH is USAID’s flagship social and behavior change (SBC) research and evaluation project to drive the generation, packaging, and use of innovative SBC research to inform programming. A six-year project (2017–2023), Breakthrough RESEARCH was led by the Population Council in collaboration with our consortium partners: Tulane University, Avenir Health, Population Reference Bureau, Institute for Reproductive Health at Georgetown University, and ideas42. Our approach is to foster collaboration and shared learning, ensure SBC programs are based in ‘what works’, elevate the impact of evidence-based SBC programs, and put evidence into practice. Breakthrough RESEARCH did this by assessing the evidence, identifying priority research questions, designing, and implementing research studies to fill evidence gaps and strengthen programs, and synthesizing and packaging evidence for use.

Within the breadth of our research portfolio, Breakthrough RESEARCH has four main project legacy areas: provider behavior change; integrated SBC; advancing SBC measurement; and costing and cost-effectiveness of SBC. For each of these legacy areas, Breakthrough RESEARCH has curated a collection of resources highlighting the state-of-the-art evidence and the tools and guidance produced by the project over the past six years to advance evidence-based SBC programming.

For more information on the other legacy areas, visit the Breakthrough RESEARCH Legacy and Learning Series page.