- Author
- Singh, Susheela, Jackqueline E. Darroch, Michael Vlassoff, Jennifer Nadeau
- Title
- Adding It Up: The Benefits of Investing in Sexual and Reproductive Health Care
- Editor
- AGI - The Alan Guttmacher Institute
- Imprint
- AGI & UNFPA, 2003, 40 pp
- ISBN/ISSN
- 0-939253-62-3
- Url
- http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/addingitup.pdf
- Abstract
"Policymakers routinely project the costs and benefits of possible interventions, to permit comparisons and guide investment choices for their limited resources. Yet costs may be difficult to compare if interventions are priced in different ways, and benefits, especially from health interventions, can be difficult to pin down they may be social rather than medical or economic, or they may be hard to express in monetary terms. Sexual and reproductive health services have unusually broad social impacts, and policymakers need better tools for assessing these interventions and comparing differences between them. This report seeks to address that need. It suggests better ways to interpret and use existing studies to evaluate the impact of sexual and reproductive health investments and also argues for broader approaches to assessing the costs and benefits of these investments. The report systematically outlines a wide range of benefits from sexual and reproductive health services, including some that have not yet been quantified or may not be quantifiable. It may be possible to capture these benefits by making better use of existing approaches, and by developing different methodologies. The report is intended to help decision-makers and resource allocators at all levels local and national governments, bilateral and multilateral donors, and nongovernmental organizations to take the broader contributions of sexual and reproductive health interventions
into account when prioritizing health and development investments."