Making Every Dollar Count: How Save the Children Maximizes Aid Impact
In a March 2025 article, Silvia Paruzzolo, Simon Fuchs, and Veronica Yepes from Save the Children shared examples and lessons learned on how the organization is maximizing aid impact per dollar spent. Three key lessons learned in making aid dollars go further are:
Integrating services into existing systems
Measuring costs alongside outcomes
Applying consistent evaluation methods across contexts.
Case studies on nutrition in Nigeria and education in El Salvador demonstrate how locally grounded, evidence-backed programs can deliver high-impact results while ensuring efficiency and sustainability.
Dioptra is a cost analysis tool that can help implementing organizations generate comparable cost analysis results for learning and improvement. Save the Children called for international development and humanitarian actors to generate and openly share cost data and knowledge, so that aid funding can be invested in the most effective programs and the most efficient delivery approaches to reach the greatest number of children per dollar.