Members at an IAWG Meeting in Geneva, March 2023

A number of tools have been developed by various UN agencies and modelling consortiums to support projections of resources needed to scale-up health service delivery and health programmes. Navigating a plethora of tools can be challenging for countries, in particular when different tools for different diseases or programmes do not use the same methods. Countries have therefore requested global institutions to align on approaches, methods and tools, in order to reduce transaction costs and workload associated with country costing processes.  A meeting on costing tools held in Senegal 2008 gave rise to recommendations that the UN should make efforts to enhance consistency between tools, and to establish standardized program components within and between the tools, to align outputs and consider a single model that looks at whole health system.

As a result, the United Nations Inter-Agency Working Group on Costing (IAWG-Costing) was set up in 2008.  The primary objective of the IAWG was initially to support the harmonization of costing and impact assessment tools used for health sector planning into a single tool and coordinate technical assistance at the country level.  The group worked together to develop the first version of the OneHealth Tool (OHT), released in 2012. The OHT has since seen continuous developments. The IAWG-Costing meets regularly to discuss coordination around costing and economic analysis between UN agencies. Current members (April 2024) include representation from UNAIDS, UNDP, UNICEF, UNFPA, and WHO. Additional supporting institutions that have formerly participated in the IAWG and/or financially supported the development of the OneHealth Tool include the World Bank, UNWomen, GFATM, Health Metrics Network and the Global Health Workforce Alliance.

The IAWG leads the development, maintenance and utilization of the OneHealth Tool - and from 2022 onwards also on the Integrated Health Tool (IHT), which is an online version of the OHT accessible through a web browser interface. The IAWG acts as the governance mechanism for the OHT/ IHT,  to define the functions required, work with tool developers to ensure the technical quality of the Tools, and to coordinate support to country, regional and global level applications, within each participating UN agency as well as in collaboration with partners.

The IAWG invites expert users  (country health planners and consultants) to sit on an expert Country Reference Group for the OHT/IHT. Members nominated for a certain period of time are regularly consulted to provide feedback on the tool and recommendations on its use. Interaction with the expert user group takes place via web technology, telephone conferences, and through participation of country representatives at the annual IAWG face to face meetings.

Current CRG members include: Kahsu Bekuretsion, Donela Besada, Nkemdilim Ene, Neil Thalagala, and Andrew Zida.

For more information on the governance structure, contact the IAWG secretariat at WHO at: whochoice@who.int