Economic evaluation of a combined microfinance and gender training intervention for the prevention of intimate partner violence in rural South Africa Introduction

(2011) Economic evaluation of a combined microfinance and gender training intervention for the prevention of intimate partner violence in rural South Africa. Key messages o There is increasing interest in the development of interventions that in resource poor settings combine health with economic and social development initiatives such as microfinance o Not much evidence currently exists of the economic viability of these types of initiatives o This study evaluated a combined microfinance and gender training intervention for the prevention of intimate partner violence in rural South Africa. It was found to be cost-effective in pilot phase and highly cost-effective in scale-up o This study suggests that proven development initiatives such as microfinance represent ideal vehicles for value-adding public health interventions and that some form of public subsidy to support and strengthen their use in such roles is warranted. Abstract Objective: Assess the cost-effectiveness of an intervention combining microfinance with gender and HIV training for the prevention of intimate partner violence (IPV) in South Africa. Methods: We did a cost-effectiveness analysis alongside a cluster-randomised trial. We assessed the cost-effectiveness of the intervention in both the trial and initial scale up phase Results: We estimated the cost per DALY gained as $7,688 for the trial phase and $2,307 for the initial scale-up. The findings were sensitive to the statistical uncertainty in effect estimates but otherwise robust to other key assumptions employed in the analysis. Conclusions: The findings suggest that this combined economic and health intervention was cost-effective in its trial phase and highly cost-effective in scale-up. These estimates are probably conservative, as they do not include the health and development benefits of the intervention beyond IPV reduction Economics microfinance & gender training