The Cost of Not Breastfeeding Tool aims to provide policymakers and advocates with a user-friendly tool to generate estimates of the potential health, human capital and economic benefits of scaling up breastfeeding promotion and support strategies. Evidence generated from the tool will be integral to raising awareness with government, industry and donors for scaling breastfeeding in accordance with the Global Breastfeeding Collective’s seven recommended policy actions.
The Cost of Not Breastfeeding Tool was first developed between 2017 and 2019 by Dr. Dylan Walters and Alive & Thrive, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This tool was instrumental in advocacy at the global level, being used for the Global Breastfeeding Collective’s Investment Case, and at the country level directly supporting efforts to advocate for policy changes and increase investments in maternal and child nutrition in numerous countries. In 2022, Nutrition International updated and developed the second version of the tool in partnership with Alive & Thrive and Limestone Analytics, with funding from the Government of Canada. This new version of the tool contains updated datasets, new indicators, a new function to calculate results for different breastfeeding rate scenarios or targets, and online access to the results for more than 100 countries.
You may access the new tool here: https://www.nutritionintl.org/learning-resource/the-cost-of-not-breastfeeding-tool/