Costing tools
Planning, Costing and Budgeting Framework
Management Sciences for Health
This is a spreadsheet-based tool developed by MSH with USAID funding for UNAIDS Global Fund training activities in Southern Africa. It provides a generic template for setting out time-bound measurable goals and objectives, estimating the variable resources required for attaining the goals and objectives, and calculating the related costs of activities linked to the goals and objectives. It also includes a section for showing sources and amounts of funding going into the activities.
The tool encourages the user to follow a structured and logical process of developing a plan, costing it and then developing a budget. The user has to provide all the input information as the framework has no built-in data values. A manual is available in English.
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Summary of main features
| Purpose | Planning, costing and budgeting major programs such as Global Fund |
| Health MDGs addressed | All |
| Scope of interventions | Any |
| Type of software | Excel |
| User manual available | Yes |
| Potential users | Planners and finance managers at national or provincial levels |
| Skills required | planning, epidemiology, spreadsheet |
| Type and length of training required | small group – 2 days |
| Costing strategy and methods | Costs activities and aggregates them to objective levels. Bottom-up, based on unit costs and quantities of activities . |
| Level of aggregation | Typically national or provincial |
| Program/system costs included | Yes |
| Time-frame | Any, but typically multi-annual |
| Modeling intervention impact or interactions on epidemiology or demography | Yes |
| Output | Cost by activity, objective, program |
| Automatic generation of reports | No |
| Country applications | Southern Africa, Nigeria |