Understanding the cost of ITC's assistance
In parallel to the mainstreaming of a results-based project management approach, ITC has also embarked on an initiative to identify the costs of its key activities. This is in response to requests from ITC’s donors, auditors and other stakeholders about the cost structure of our interventions and the related results.
In addition, ITC’s senior management also need cost information in order to improve corporate efficiency. Information about the cost at which ITC achieves its results is an important element of effective results-based management. This information would be used for monitoring and planning at project and corporate level with a view to improving the cost-benefit relationship of ITC’s technical assistance.
Currently, ITC’s financial system is based on the UN’s Integrated Management Information System (IMIS). This system, however, is not activity oriented, which means that costs are not linked torelated outputs. Furthermore, expenditure from the organization's regular budget are not connected to project management activities, meaning that only a partial view of real project costs is available.
ITC therefore developed a methodology where expenses are distributed among the outputs for which costs have been incurred. It is a real-time mapping of expenditure, which represents inputs such as staff salaries, travel costs and consultancy payments, against their corresponding outputs. Extra-budgetary funds and regular budget funds are both taken into account in this model.
In order to validate and test this methodology, output costs were calculated for ten operational TRTA projects, representing 17 per cent of ITC’s extra-budgetary expenditure for 2012. The aggregated data produces preliminary information about the costs of ITC’s interventions such as the average cost per trained participant of a workshop (USD 600 per participant *) or the cost range across all workshops (from USD 1,500 to USD 77,000) depending on the project and the beneficiary country.
* Average based on 68 workshops