Child Profile Estimation and Costing Model
If a government wants to keep its youngest children well-nourished, it first needs to know two things: who those children are, and what reaching them actually costs. Over five years, the Right2Grow consortium built a tool to answer both — and by the close of the programme in 2025, the Bangladesh National Nutrition Council had endorsed it and government had begun writing it into the country’s next national nutrition plan.
What the tool actually doeswho, and how much?
The Child Profile Estimation and Costing Model does two jobs at once. First it builds a profile of the children in a given area — how many are under five, how many are malnourished, and which nutrition, health and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) services they are missing. Then it attaches realistic costs to closing those gaps, so the local council and national ministries can see, in concrete figures, what reaching every child would actually require.
That turns a moral argument — every child deserves adequate nutrition and clean water — into a budget line a Union Parishad (the lowest tier of local government in Bangladesh) can plan against, and a number a ministry can fund. The consortium piloted the model with 7,120 households across Bangladesh’s climate-vulnerable south-western coastal districts — Patuakhali, Barguna, Khulna and Satkhira — where cyclones, salinity and high inflation make every public taka count. It now sits alongside a digital Budget Monitoring and Expenditure Tracking (BMET) tool, so a budget line, once won, can be followed all the way to the household.
Households profiled in the costing model pilot across four coastal districts
Share of public budgets allocated and implemented for nutrition and WASH, 2021 to 2025 (target was 6%)
Allocated for child nutrition and health across the 40 Union Parishads in the programme
From a coastal tool to national policy
The clearest sign that the model works is who has taken it up. The Bangladesh National Nutrition Council (BNNC) has formally endorsed it, and the consortium’s recommendations — including child profiling and costing — are being built into the revised National Nutrition Policy and the country’s Third National Plan of Action for Nutrition (NPAN3). The model is no longer a project pilot: it is used routinely by joint working teams of civil society organisations, local government institutions and government frontline staff to plan and monitor services, and it has been recognised by the BNNC, the Institute of Public Health and Nutrition and the Civil Society Alliance for Scaling Up Nutrition for national replication.
It is also outliving the programme itself. Consortium members — including Action Against Hunger, World Vision and Max Foundation — are carrying the costing model, the BMET tool and the Healthy Village approach into new and ongoing programmes, and it has been showcased internationally as a practical model for local-level planning and budgeting.
A costing model turns “children need better nutrition” into a figure a Union Parishad can budget, a ministry can fund, and a national plan can adopt.
Evidence that moved money
The adoption shows up in budgets. Across all 40 Union Parishads in the programme, nutrition and WASH priorities were written into Annual Development Plans, and the share of public budgets allocated and implemented for these services rose from 1.45% in 2021 to 18% in 2025 — well past the 6% target — amounting to around BDT 36 million for child nutrition and health. Drawing on the evidence, all 40 Union Parishad chairmen jointly petitioned the Local Government Division for larger child-nutrition budgets, a request endorsed by the District Commissioner, and the local government ministry went on to issue a formal letter to the Ministry of Finance asking for additional funds for Union Parishads.
What the evidence helped shift, Right2Grow Bangladesh, 2021–2025
| Indicator | 2021 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Share of public budgets allocated and implemented for nutrition and WASH | 1.45% | 18% |
| Union Parishads with nutrition and WASH in their Annual Development Plans | 0 of 40 | 40 of 40 |
| Child profiling and costing reflected in the National Plan of Action for Nutrition | Not reflected | NPAN3 |
| Households profiled in the costing model pilot | — | 7,120 |
A costing model is, in the end, a quiet kind of advocacy. It does not raise its voice; it simply makes the case impossible to wave away — this is who the children are, this is what reaching them costs, and this is the budget line that gets it done. What makes the Bangladesh story unusual is how far that case travelled: from 7,120 households on the coast to a national nutrition plan.
Source: Right2Grow Bangladesh End of Programme Report 2021–2025 (Max Foundation), funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands. Figures are programme results across the 40 Union Parishads in the programme; the budget share compares the 2021 and 2025 financial years.