USAID’s approach to Value for Money: Let’s See Where the Money Goes

• In Event: What does value for money mean when it comes to educating a child?

Proposal

While USAID, and the education sector broady, has made major advances in using evidence to inform program design, adaptively manage projects, and promote learning across the sector, this work has largely been blind to cost or value considerations. The result of operating without cost information is that we lack insight into a host of key issues, which are necessary to ensure we’re meeting the immediate needs of children globally, and planning for long-term scale and sustainability. In response to this, the USAID Office of Education has developed a framework for systematically capturing cost information and producing standard analyses, so as to drive forward Value for Money (VfM) objectives.

The USAID VfM framework aims to answer key questions about how resources are spent, what level of investment is needed to produce desired outputs, and identify areas where a shift in allocation could result in better outcomes or value for the investment. A standardized approach to measurement and analysis of cost and outcomes enables USAID to better allocate resources across contexts and levels of need USAID Education interventions, work with local government and other partners to plan for scale and sustainability, and evaluate the cost effectiveness of comparable interventions.

USAID recognizes that measuring VfM in education necessarily rests on capturing both outcomes and the cost of inputs from multiple sources (not only USAID partners, but also local actors). Value for the USAID Office of Education means education interventions that are of high quality, inclusive of marginalized and vulnerable populations, and can be sustained over the long term, as applicable. USAID recognizes that simply reaching the greatest number of beneficiaries, without clear guidelines and parameters around quality, could result in resources being spent too thin to affect any kind of quality, meaningful change. Conversely, a highly concentrated expenditure in a small region or to reach only a more advantaged section of the population might show great results, but not be scaleable or sustainable in the long term, thus potentially reducing the long term value of the approach. USAID’s VfM approach is based on a careful consideration of metrics to capture the value of education interventions, and standardized expenditure data.

The presentation will present USAID’s approach to capturing and analyzing costs of USAID education interventions, with the aim of both strengthening VfM across USAID interventions and providing the evidence base for achieving long term value and sustainability.

Author

• Christine Harris-Van Keuren, SALT Analytics