May 19, 2020

SEEMS-Nutrition estimates costs of early childhood development programs in Malawi

The Strengthening Economic Evaluation for Multi-sectoral Strategies for Nutrition (SEEMS-Nutrition) project, led by Dr. Carol Levin (Health Economist and Associate Professor, Global Health), has a unique opportunity to collect cost data alongside six on-going interventions and to generate new evidence on costs and cost-effectiveness of multi-sectoral projects in five country settings.  Click here to read more about SEEMS-Nutrition.

The project applied its costing evaluation approaches to retrospectively estimate the costs and impact for an integrated agricultural, early childhood development, and school feeding randomized-control trial conducted in Malawi. 

This evaluation provides policymakers important country-level data of the feeding program’s activities for planning and scaling up a national childhood nutritional program.  Overall, SEEMS-Nutrition’s costing approach can be applied in different country settings, with different multisectoral components to improve child nutritional status and health outcomes. Comparisons with other integrated agriculture and nutrition interventions may not be straightforward due to the heterogeneity in intervention design and the absence of a standardized costing approach that captures activities across sectors.

In three other country settings, the team has completed at least one round of data collection and will continue to collect and analyze data from other partner countries abroad.