Table 2.

Aims, appropriate uses, advantages, and disadvantages of the four approaches for estimating aid for RMNCH

	Countdown	Muskoka	OECD RMNCH policy marker	IHME
Aim	To estimate the monetary value of aid promoting RMNCH	As for Countdown	As for Countdown and Muskoka	To estimate the monetary value of development (not humanitarian) aid to the health sector and then to characterise the health focus areas of this aid
Appropriate uses of estimates of aid for (R)MNCH for each approach	Assess effectiveness of aid in improving coverage and health, assess adequacy of aid relative to cost estimates, granular donor-specific and recipient-specific analyses	Frequent global monitoring, more appropriate for global than donor-specific or recipient-specific analyses, assess adequacy of aid relative to cost estimates (especially at global level)	Limited to analyses of individual donors' aid flows because few donors have provided complete data	Analyse donors' priorities, eg, whether setting global goals led to changes in funding targeting RMNCH or specific diseases; granular donor-specific analyses of funding priorities
Advantages	Exploits publicly available data, provides relatively precise estimates based on available data	Quick to implement, exploits publicly available data, fully transparent, agreed by donors and generates estimates they can predict, credits donor countries for their contributions to most major multilateral institutions (but not the EU), adaptable to new goals, replicable	Fully transparent, agreed by donors and generates estimates they can predict, quick for analysts to implement, replicable estimates (although donor coding is not replicable)	Longest time trends; estimates development aid for health sector as a whole; adaptable to new goals; fully credits donor countries for their contributions to multilateral institutions, including the EU; exploits some descriptive data on individual projects (using key terms)
Disadvantages	Perceived subjectivity, complexity, labour-intensive to implement, open to human error in coding, not readily adaptable to new goals	Imprecise process for identifying aid; excludes humanitarian sector, so estimates of health aid biased against countries in crisis and donors focused on health in humanitarian contexts	Not readily adaptable to new goals; burdensome for donors; no robust trend analysis possible for global aid, recipients, or most donors, because of lack of data; relatively imprecise coding scheme; donors might code differently, making comparisons between donors problematic	Complexity; does not fully exploit publicly available data; excludes humanitarian sector, so estimates of health aid biased against countries in crisis and donors focused on humanitarian contexts

RMNCH=reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health. OECD=Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. IHME=Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.