Health impact funds often report:
• number of patients reached
• treatments delivered
• facilities financed
These are important. But do they answer a more fundamental question: “How much health are we actually creating per dollar invested?”
In global health, this question isn’t new.
Is the cost per DALY metric able to answer this question? For high-impact nonprofits, it does. It helps decision-makers assess:
• Which interventions save the most lives
• Which delivers the greatest improvement in health
• How efficiently resources are being used
However, despite operating in the same sectors, most impact investors don’t report cost per DALY. There are valid reasons: attribution is harder in market-based models, data is often incomplete, outcomes take time to materialise, and #LPs rarely require this level of analysis.
There are downsides, though, to tracking outputs. For example, we risk missing differences in intervention effectiveness, trade-offs between scale and depth of #impact, and knowing whether capital is flowing to the highest-impact opportunities.
Even if imperfect, introducing cost per DALY could anchor impact in real health outcomes, enable comparisons across interventions, improve capital allocation decisions, and strengthen accountability to impact goals
