Measuring Costs of Donor‐Funded Education Programming

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. Policy-makers and donors cannot make fully informed decisions about the
best way to invest limited resources without information about the costs of achieving desired
outputs and outcomes through different interventions or delivery strategies. Evidence on cost of
interventions is also critical for making responsible decisions about scaling and sustaining
programs within country systems. However, differences in donor and national reporting systems
currently hamper collection and analysis of cost data. Thus, opportunities for policy decision
making that include cost information are often missed by national governments and international
funders. This guidance note addresses this gap by introducing a common framework for
collecting, analyzing, and using cost information across the global donor-supported education
portfolio.

The BE2 Steering Committee*

February 2020

*The Building Evidence in Education (BE2) is a donor working group led by a Steering Committee composed
of the Department for International Development (DFID), United Nations International Children’s
Emergency Fund (UNICEF), United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and The World
Bank Group. The Mission of BE2 is to harmonize research efforts across donors with the ultimate objective
of improving availability and quality of data and evidence for decision making by national governments and
funders.