Costing Pre-Analysis Plan for Lishe Bora

This costing pre-analysis plan outlines policy and research questions, as well as methods and data needed to conduct a costing study of the healthy foods nutrition intervention, Lishe Bora. The experimental intervention delivered coupons to randomly-selected households in three urban wards of the Temeke district of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania over six weeks in early 2024. The coupons subsidize the cost of purchasing healthy foods in small, convenient markets called Dukas. Plans for the cost research include estimating: i) the cost of the intervention treatment in comparison to a no-treatment counterfactual group, ii) innovation costs, and iii) the cost of alternative delivery modalities. Expenditure data will be collected from the primary implementing partner, the Economic and Social Research Foundation (ESRF). Additional data will be drawn from time-use surveys and the baseline, midline and endline surveys undertaken for the impact evaluation and from monitoring activities. The data will be combined and used to construct a baseline cost model for the intervention and one or more alternative models to explore the cost of alternative delivery strategies. The cost estimates will additionally be paired with impact estimates from the randomized evaluation to calculate the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio for each of the positive and statistically significant primary and secondary outcomes.