A good example of costing within the family planning space is the use of cost data to inform Costed Implementation Plans (CIPs) and strategic planning.

What is a CIP?

A CIP is a multi-year actionable roadmap designed to help governments achieve their family planning goals by translating commitments into concrete programs and policies. Costs can be used to first prioritize family planning interventions and then to forecast future costs. The cost data can inform strategic allocation decisions where the technical support team adjusts and prioritizes activities based on the estimated cost of implementation.

A tool called FP Goals can help inform the CIP process. This tool combines demographic data, family planning program information, and evidence of the effectiveness of interventions to help decision-makers set realistic goals and prioritize investments across different family planning interventions.

Program planners can utilize FP Goals to model scale-up and implementation of new programs. Based on the scale of interventions in these programs (how many people the intervention is anticipated to reach), baseline coverage is estimated. FP Goals then uses global evidence on the effectiveness of various types of FP interventions to project the impact of increases in coverage on the growth in the modern contraceptive prevalence rate (mCPR).

FP Goals examines service delivery and access interventions, along with demand creation and one contraceptive security intervention.

FP Goals does not calculate the impact of all program areas. Missing areas include policy and advocacy, contraceptive security (one is included), finance, stewardship/governance, and supervision/monitoring/coordination. These are excluded because effectiveness data are generally not available; however, these areas should be included in the strategic planning exercise.

Outside of the CIP process, countries continue to have a lack of timely and accurate cost data to inform program planning and prioritization. Activity-Based Costing and Management is the approach to costing preferred by Track20, that can potentially help to fill this gap. To learn more about the Activity-Based Costing and Management approach and access tools used in the process, visit Track20's Introduction to Activity-Based Costing and Management for Family Planning Programs Online Training.

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