STI Prevention Benefit-Cost Optimization
RCTClinical Trial
Standard face-to-face sexual health interventions in low- and middle-income countries incur high per-student costs (ranging from $27 to $85), limiting widespread government adoption and public funding sustainability.
Picture this
By converting human-led instruction into digital web modules supervised by a small centralized team, the fixed setup costs are spread over thousands of users. This dramatically drops the price per student, making the health benefits gained far outweigh the money spent to deliver the software.
What the evidence says
Marginal course delivery cost was $14.60 per student ($10 remote tutor, $2.10 platform, $2.50 hardware depreciation); $1,000 spent averts 2.20 STIs, yielding a cost per averted STI of $455 against a monetary benefit of $785 per averted STI (Benefit-to-Cost Ratio = 1.72).
- Who was studied
- Economic modeling based on N = 4,599 public school ninth-grade students across 21 Colombian cities.
- How
- Cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit framework calculating marginal delivery costs against Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) saved from prevented sexually transmitted infections.
What to do
Reallocate public health budgets toward centralized digital learning platforms to lower per-capita costs and achieve benefit-to-cost ratios exceeding 1.5 in adolescent health programs.
From the source
"The headline result is that the course averts one STI at a cost of $455, indicating a benefit-to-cost ratio of 1.72, well above one. This implies that the course is socially desirable, even with typical deadweight loss factors due to taxation."
Do Information Technologies Improve Teenagers’ Sexual Education? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Colombia