Second Webinar on Costing the Scale-Up of Family Planning Programs: A Focus on Models and Tools for Costing
The community of practice facilitated by E2A and Implementing Best Practices Consortium—Systematic Approaches for Scale-up of Reproductive Health/Family Planning Best Practices—held its second webinar on the topic of costing for scale-up. The webinar, entitled Models and Tools for Costing the Scale-Up of Family Planning Programs, took place Wednesday, March 19.
During the webinar, economist Lori Bollinger of the Futures Institute described Spectrum, a tool that provides a powerful suite of costing models. She focused on one Spectrum module—FamPlan—which links with the Futures Family Planning Unit Cost Database, providing planners with comparative costs of family planning methods and service delivery points across 166 countries. Lori elaborated on how the FamPlan module can be applied to reach multuiple goals, including costing the scale-up of family planning programs, evaluating changes to the method mix, and assisting with market segmentation strategies, among others.
Zina Jarrah, an international health financing expert from Management Sciences for Health, presented Cost and Revenue Analysis Plus—better known as CORE Plus—a useful tool for costing the scale-up of family planning programs within an integrated package of services at the primary level. A Q&A session following the presentation focused on practical uses of the tools at the country level and challenges to using the tools, among others.
Both presenters provided useful links for accessing the tools:
Visit the Family Planning Unit Cost Database
Watch a training video on Spectrum
You can access the Powerpoint presentations from the webinar here:
Presentation by Lori Bollinger: Using FamPlan for Advocacy Purposes
Please stay tuned for a date and time for the third webinar on costing for scale-up, which will focus on sources of financing the costs of scale-up and the challenges inherent to that process.