The costing component of the Multi-Country Evaluation (MCE) of the Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses (IMCI) has two main goals: to determine from evidence whether IMCI is of high, moderate, or low cost-effectiveness compared with other ways of using scarce health resources; and to communicate the outcome to health planners and donors, informing them also of the financial costs incurred in introducing and maintaining IMCI.

The MCE costing methodology and the accompanying data collection tools at the national, district, health facility and household levels are designed to ensure that all relevant cost data are collected and analysed in a standardized way across the different sites. A standard methodology ensures that cross-national costs can be compared in order to understand the variations of costs within and between the countries concerned. This allows policy-makers in other settings to determine whether the results are applicable to their populations.