Making Every Dollar Count: How Save the Children Maximizes Aid Impact

Foreign Aid, A Cost-Effective Lifeline?

Maximizing the value of every donated dollar for kids has never been more urgent. With shrinking global aid budgets and growing needs, it’s estimated that 1 in 11 children needs humanitarian assistance. More than 1 in 6 kids live in conflict zones, 251 million globally are out of school and over 700 million face extreme weather risks such as droughts, floods and fires. 

These children and their communities often rely on foreign assistance to survive. Aid funding cuts threaten Save the Children’s lifesaving work, stretching our limited resources even further. However, making the most of every dollar has long been part of our DNA, so every investment makes a real difference.

Balancing Aid’s Cost and Impact

Understanding how to replicate and scale successful programs is mission-critical for us at Save the Children. Some initiatives achieve a greater impact per dollar compared to others. This is why we strive to include cost-analysis in every impact evaluation to identify the most efficient delivery approaches and reach the greatest number of children.  

How do we balance both the impact and costs of our programs? Here are three key lessons we've learned.

1.) Assistance Can Be More Cost-Effective When Integrated into Local Systems —Leveraging existing systems leads to both lower costs and greater sustainability by the community and local authorities. For example, over ten years, Save the Children evaluated the cost and impact of our Building Brains early childhood stimulation program across countries, finding that investing in early childhood development activities has significant, lasting impacts for children’s development and life-long learning.

We found that Building Brains was most cost-effective when integrated into existing primary health visits by community health workers, rather than as stand-alone interventions. For every $100 invested, kids gained an average of three months of development. For a two-year old, this could mean using 60 or more words instead of fewer than 20, going from walking to running, or from diapers to using the toilet independently. 

Our nutrition program in Northern Nigeria also showed that locally led aid can be more cost-efficient. The project provided a water-based nutritional porridge for malnourished children made from local Nigerian ingredients.  Procuring these in local markets was 35% less costly than through the centralized global supply chains —which incurred high costs for food storage and distribution— while having the added benefit of supporting local small businesses.

2.) Cost Alone Doesn’t Tell the Full Story —Just because something costs less, doesn't mean it's the best for kids. A program that is less expensive to run may not deliver the impact we are seeking. For example, our team in El Salvador compared the cost and learning outcomes of traditional after-school math classes for children ages 9-12 with self-guided, digital math classes using tablets. In this case, while digital math was cheaper per student, it was less effective than traditional math in raising test scores. However, investing in technology for education can become more cost-effective over time, since devices like tablets can be re-used by multiple students. Digital, self-guided instruction is also more scalable in contexts where qualified math teachers are hard to find.

So, which approach is the right one? Cost-analysis alone isn’t enough to decide, and conclusions are rarely black or white. Impact, scalability and context —such as the availability local resources like internet or teachers— must also be considered.

3.) A High Return on Aid? Generating Evidence as a Public Good — Finding what works best, where, when and how takes time and money, which is why we’ve captured our learnings in our evidence-based Common Approaches. Each one addresses a specific problem faced by children, such as accessing treatment for preventable illnesses or learning to read and write. For these issues, we share what works, the evidence to prove it, and guidance on implementing solutions. 

Every program needs to be tailored to the local context and needs of the communities we work with, but this common guidance helps us streamline project design, saving time and money while consistently delivering our best work for children worldwide. To ensure that this knowledge doesn’t just benefit Save the Children, we’ve published our Common Approaches on our external Resource Center for practitioners and implementers alike to access. This site includes thousands of reports on the effectiveness and challenges of projects we’ve implemented.

This is also why we co-created the Dioptra cost analysis tool with other leading nonprofits, enabling international development and humanitarian organizations to rapidly generate and publish cost-efficiency analyses for their programs, using existing financial and monitoring data. Ultimately, these resources are a public good, adding to the collective knowledge in humanitarian assistance and development work, and repaying the initial investment in evidence generation many times over.

Maximizing the Impact for Every Dollar

Save the Children has been delivering for kids since the early 1900s —we know firsthand that the world in which we operate has changed greatly. As children’s needs have evolved too, we’ve evaluated our programs and adapted, pioneering new approaches to provide the support they need most. In the process, we’ve learned that choosing the most effective programs that can reach as many children as possible means thinking about both costs and impact. Integrating our efforts into existing local systems is essential for efficiency and sustainability, and sharing the knowledge we’ve acquired can multiply our impact.

Only by learning from these experiences can we ensure that children receive the greatest return on our investments and have the opportunity to reach their full potential.