This document discusses the program experience approach to costing nutrition programs. It involves estimating costs based on actual programs that have been implemented rather than hypothetical programs. The key points made are: - It estimates the cost of what is currently being delivered based on total program expenditures and the number of people served to determine a unit cost. - Cost data comes from program budgets and expenditure reports from implementing agencies, donors, and academics. - Advantages are that costs reflect real-world inefficiencies and are a reasonable approximation of future costs. - Challenges include needing quality unit cost data, which requires an initial data collection effort that may be lengthy since programs need to already exist. - An

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
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2. Approaches to Costing
“Ingredients
approach”
“Program
experience
approach”
(Positive costing)
(Normative costing) Estimating the cost
of what should be
Estimating the cost
of what is

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

10. THANK YOU
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