The Brookings Childhood Cost Calculator (C3)

• In Event: Making Cents: How tools and methods are helping the sector conduct cost analysis

Proposal

The Brookings Childhood Cost Calculator (C3) is a free, user-friendly tool for costing childhood interventions across a wide range of sectors related to children and young people, including education (early childhood through tertiary), health, nutrition, water and sanitation, social protection, and governance. Based on the Tangerine platform from Research Triangle Institute (RTI International), C3 can be used by stakeholders across the spectrum including policymakers, funders, implementers, and researchers to help answer a multitude of costing questions related to program/intervention planning, adaptation and changes, and cost distribution. C3 can also assist in answering questions related to cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analyses when paired with evaluation data.

C3, which was piloted in several countries throughout 2022 before its 2023 launch, builds upon nearly a decade of research focusing on ECD costs and costing out of the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at the Brookings Institution. This early work led to the Standardized ECD Costing Tool (SECT) which was created and piloted in collaboration with the World Bank and launched in 2017. SECT aimed to provide methodological consistency to costing the full range of ECD interventions. While SECT was a major step forward in reducing barriers to costing within ECD, it also highlighted areas of challenge and opportunity for the future.


Based on the learnings from SECT, Brookings developed C3. Addressing feedback from SECT, C3 was engineered with novice users in mind. It includes built-in functionalities including currency conversion and amortization. Users enter costs into a questionnaire, which then generates data visualizations that can be filtered by cost category, resource type, cost year, investment/recurrent costs, and intervention sector and type. Disaggregated data can be downloaded in CSV format. With guidance documents freely available online and future plans for expanded languages, C3 exemplifies a focus on reducing reliance on global north experts for and reinforces local actors’ capacity to complete costing exercises.


To further advance the momentum of transparency in cost data, users of C3 have the option to consent to having aggregated data included in the Cost Data Explorer. This database of childhood intervention and program costs makes costing data widely and publicly available, allowing funders, implementers, and policymakers to examine the range of costs by type of program and context, aiding their decision-making processes.


This presentation aims to introduce the Brookings Childhood Cost Calculator and Cost Data Explorer, with a particular focus on how the calculator and explorer can be used by generalists and local actors to answer their own costing questions.

Author

• Emily Gustafsson-Wright, The Brookings Institution