Purpose

The purpose of the Community Costing Tool is to help managers and planners estimate the start-up or scale-up costs of service delivery at the community level.

Description

The Community Costing Tool is a spreadsheet-based tool developed by MSH with USAID funding for the Rebuilding Basic Health Services Project in Liberia. The tool was developed to estimate the costs of providing services at the community level, including supervision, training, and drug costs. The tool calculates the total number of Community Health Volunteers (CHVs) that are required to meet population-based norms. The tool allows up to fifteen interventions to be input by the user, and target groups and incidence rates for each intervention determine the total number of services that are required to be delivered at the community level. The direct and indirect costs of providing these services are then calculated. Direct costs include drugs and medical commodities, and indirect costs include facility-based supervision and incentives, in addition to training costs.

Intended Users

Planners and service and finance managers

Advantages

The tool is easy to use and easily adapted to individual community health programs. The tool calculates the following:

• the number of community health volunteers required to fulfill population-based norms, including additional volunteers to make up for attrition;
• the number of community health services required to provide coverage to the desired population size;
• the total cost of providing these services over a period of up to 10 years;
• the total direct costs of providing these services (drug costs);
• the total indirect costs of providing these services (training, supervision, and incentives).
  

Limitations

This tool only calculates service delivery costs at community and is not a complete vertical program costing tool

Recommendations for Users

Managers can use this tool to see training, supervision, and other resources needs and costs for different numbers of services at the community level.

Inquiries

All inquiries can be sent to costingtools@msh.org