Generating and Using Cost Evidence in USAID Education Programs: Practical Approaches

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

In 2018, USAID/Education launched the Cost Reporting Guidance for USAID-Funded Education Activities (1) and in 2020, the Cost Analysis Guidance for USAID-Funded Education Activities (2). In USAID/Education’s history, these documents were the first of their kind to provide a framework and pragmatic structure for capturing and analyzing the billions of dollars invested by USAID in education development projects. The goal of the cost measurement initiative is to improve sustainability and local ownership, and assist USAID in planning and managing its education investments. Imagine how much more realistic, efficient, and sustainable USAID/Education’s work could be if it had complete information about the costs associated with the programs it invests in and the cost of the impacts that are made? This is an entirely different way of thinking for USAID/Education and it could fundamentally change what we know, or what we thought we knew, about education development projects. In fact, USAID believes so strongly in this new vision that in 2021, it announced that collecting costs for all new USAID funded education activities is mandatory (3).

Given the nascent nature of USAID's cost measurement initiative, lessons regarding cost reporting and analysis approaches as well as the nature of potential findings are quickly evolving. In this session, we will share key findings on analysis methodology adaptations as well as findings from the application of these methods in two USAID-funded education activities. This session not only shows that USAID has new ways of thinking about education, but also how it can help the education sector as a whole.

The panel includes a presentation of USAID’s revised cost analysis guidance that is reflected in USAID’s recently released revised cost analysis guidance (4). This revised guidance is more nuanced in terms of methods, and now includes practical tools and worksheets for cost analysts. It is the go-to hands-on reference for cost analysis for the international education sector. The panel then moves to two innovative studies. The first is a study on the costs associated with procuring books, a critical resource used in most every education intervention. The books were procured in regions around the world, and the study highlights some of the cost differences in these different contexts along with cost drivers that may be more universal. This book study is the first of its kind for USAID-funded activities and serves as an initial spark to inform decision-making on how to maximize the possible reach of education interventions by cutting costs where pedagogical quality will not suffer. The second study features a discussion of the costs associated with implementing an early grade literacy program in Pakistan. This study provides solid evidence that often overlooked overhead costs are critical to the completeness of a cost analysis. Together, these presentations demonstrate how quickly USAID/Education is learning from its new cost analysis initiative and how the findings can help reimagine everything we thought we knew.

The content of this session contributes to the growing body of work on cost analysis for international development programming, such as that of DFID (5), IRC (6), J-PAL (7), and the World Bank (8), bringing into the conversation a new approach tailored to the context of the education sector, the first of its kind. While the field of international education has made great strides in recent years with raising the number and the quality of impact evaluations, their results are incomplete without cost data for these interventions. Developing standard mechanisms for capturing the costs of education interventions will increase transparency, allow for the linkage of costs to outcomes, and enable value-for-money analyses, thus providing a pathway toward the ongoing improvement of evaluations in the education sector and beyond. This session will further deepen this dialogue by engaging participants in a discussion on the methods used and findings identified in two recent cost analyses related to the education sector.

Sub Unit

• Monitoring and Evaluation SIG

Chair

• Amy Mulcahy-Dunn, EnCompass LLC

Individual Presentations

• Ways of Knowing: Refining How We Approach Cost Analysis Methods - Christine Harris-Van Keuren, Salt Analytics

• Harnessing Cost Data to Improve Early Grade Reading: Cost Evidence from a Large-Scale Literacy Initiative in Pakistan - Kayla Hoyer, IRC

• By the book: The costs of teaching and learning materials in low- and middle-income countries - Alfred Theodore Rizzo, EnCompass LLC

Discussant

• Elena Walls, USAID