The Challenge
The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), a philanthropic organization that aims to “improve the lives of children living in poverty in developing countries by achieving large-scale, sustainable impact” prides itself on high-impact investing. It seeks to achieve a high return on its investment in the form of large scale, transformative impacts in the lives of children. In order to achieve its aim, CIFF wishes to harness a growing body of knowledge around costing, cost-effectiveness and financing and apply it to its core investments.
The Opportunity
CIFF asked Results for Development to develop frameworks for costing, cost-effectiveness analysis, and financial sustainability that the Foundation can use consistently across five CIFF priority areas: neonatal mortality, early childhood education, severe and acute malnutrition, prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV and de-worming.
Through the identification of relevant costs, cost effectiveness and financing methods, data sources and benchmarks, these frameworks will inform both the types of investments that CIFF makes in each of these domains as well as the way in which it evaluates its investments. The successful application of these frameworks will facilitate the achievement of high-performing, sustainable programs that operate at scale.
Our Work
- Prepared draft frameworks for each of the priority areas, through systematic literature review, interviews with experts, development of analytical tools, etc
- Conducted a workshop for CIFF staff to present draft findings and review ways to operationalize them
- Worked with CIFF to apply costing, cost-effectiveness, and sustainability approaches to selected investment proposals.
