Software global goods are digital tools, often “free and open-source”, that can be adapted and reused for the global health sector to meet the needs of various countries and contexts. As low and middle income countries (LMICs) increasingly embrace the use of software tools to address global health needs, it is important to be able to evaluate the upfront and ongoing maintenance costs of software in order to decide whether to buy, build, or adapt digital health software services.

Software Global Goods: A Valuation Framework is an Excel-based tool that provides a framework to estimate (a) the retrospective development cost of a software global good, so that decision makers can assess the relative value of global goods as compared to building a new software from scratch; and (b) the ongoing costs required to enable the core software to remain stable, develop new features, and stay competitive.

The Software Global Goods: A Valuation Framework and accompanying User’s Guide can be leveraged by donors, governments, software development organizations, and other stakeholders. In addition to demonstrating the financial value of investments in these tools’ creation and their ongoing maintenance costs, the tool can be used to interpret the replacement value of these global goods. Finally, the tool includes an addendum a working draft of a separate framework to help countries think about how to best budget and plan for country-level digital health global good implementations.

This launch includes three documents:

• Software Global Goods Valuation Framework: An excel-based tool with step-by-step instructions for users.
• User’s Guide: A PDF document to help users understand the background, context, and methodology contained in this document, as well as the importance of software global goods in the changing global health landscape.
• Budgeting for Country-Level Digital Health Implementations: An excel-based framework that helps countries and stakeholders plan and budget for digital health global goods implementations at the country level.