Cost-Benefit Analysis only drives impact when it delivers the right insights at the right time. This piece explores how to strategically prioritize what really matters, tailor the depth of analysis to budget and deadlines, and harness technology and smart data collection to work faster without sacrificing rigor. From infrastructure and health to agriculture and conservation, it offers practical strategies for using limited resources efficiently while keeping decision-makers equipped with timely, decision-ready evidence.

Traditional Cost-Benefit Analysis can miss the real story when it ignores pollution, resource depletion, inequality, and job creation—especially in regions like Sub-Saharan Africa. This piece unpacks how to recognize and monetize social and environmental externalities, integrate climate adaptation and employment impacts, and bring communities, youth, and women into the analysis. The result is a more honest, sustainability-focused CBA that guides policies and investments toward long-term social welfare and environmental resilience.

Sunk costs can quietly sabotage even the most rigorous Cost-Benefit Analysis by pressuring us to “defend” past investments instead of choosing the best path forward. This piece lays out a practical approach to separating unrecoverable past spending from future-focused decisions—evaluating opportunity costs, stress-testing assumptions with sensitivity analysis, and communicating clearly with stakeholders. When we treat sunk costs as history, CBA becomes a sharper tool for resilience, agility, and sustainable growth.

Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) is a powerful tool for shaping economic policy—but too often it treats society as if everyone benefits in the same way. This piece explores how integrating gender and youth dimensions into CBA can reveal hidden constraints, sharpen targeting, and support more inclusive, resilient investments. By disaggregating data and listening directly to women and young people, we can design projects that are not only efficient on paper, but genuinely equitable in practice.

Before any big district or national rollout, one question matters most: will the benefits truly outweigh the costs over time? This post walks through a practical, step-by-step approach to Cost-Benefit Analysis—showing how to define a solid counterfactual, capture real-world costs, run sensitivity tests, and deliver decision-ready metrics like NPV, BCR, and IRR.

How many key informant interviews are “enough” in a Cost-Benefit Analysis? Drawing on CBA work across Africa, Latin America, and Asia, I argue that quality beats quantity: what really matters is information power, diverse perspectives, and just enough well-targeted KIIs to build credible, policy-relevant financial scenarios.