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Authors: Kristian Schultz Hansen, Shunmay Yeung

This guidance is intended for a non-economist audience to enable them to understand the importance of household costs related to seeking health care as well as participating in the collection of household costs in the field.
It may be used as input for developing household cost data collection tools for health research (although targeted at malaria interventions) and it includes an example of a household cost data collection tool (also available for download).


The main topics incorporated in this guidance are:

  • Definition of household cost related to household burden of malaria (out-of-pocket expenditure for seeking treatment, value of time lost due to disease - when not able to perform normal activities including travel and waiting time and time being bedridden)
  • Identification of relevant categories of household cost, including direct and indirect household cost of malaria
  • How to measure household cost
  • Description of methods to value time lost due to disease

You can download the guidance and the copyright and usage policy on the right hand side of this screen. Please download the copyright and usage policy documents before using this guidance.

This material has been developed by the ACT Consortium, a global research partnership of eminent public health and academic institutions.