The Knowledge library

Estimating the Cost of Educating and Training Nurses and Midwives: Balancing Quantity and Quality

This case study is part of the interactive ePlatform for the World Health Organization’s guidelines on transforming and scaling up health professionals’ education and training. Knowledge about the cost of educating and training health workers is needed to support education program planning and management and to inform advocacy for increased investment. Ethiopia’s federal ministries of health and education collaborated with CapacityPlus and the Nursing Education Partnership Initiative to conduct a cost analysis of the nursing and midwifery programs at two colleges. The objectives were to estimate the cost of producing a graduate; identify fixed-asset constraints to scaling up the quantity and/or improving quality of graduates; and simulate the new cost per graduate for interventions to increase the quality of graduates.