Globally, economic evaluation is gaining prominence as a potential tool for advocacy in health care programmes. Economic evaluations can inform decisions concerning the efficiency and allocation of resources to implementation strategies which are explicitly designed to inform care providers and patients about the best available evidence and to enhance its use in their practices. These strategies are increasingly popular in health care especially in light of growing concerns about quality of care and limits on resources. However, such concerns have hardly driven health authorities and other decision-makers to spend on some form of economic evaluation in their assessments of implementation strategies.

The goals of economic evaluation are to measure efficiency or the value of money utilised on one health intervention programme in comparison to another and also to provide advice to decision-makers or stakeholders on health care intervention programme, and thus help healthcare resources allocation. Decision on health care programme can be made from the analysis of the information obtained on the cost and consequences of the various alternative health programmes.

Teaching and training on health economics may not be difficult, however, conducting economic evaluation research has many challenges. Evaluating the effectiveness of a health programme is taxing especially if the programme has been initiated without prior justification and evaluation was not planned from the beginning. Getting the cost faces many obstacles not only because of the lack of data and appropriate accounting system but also because confidentiality and sensitivity are issues which need to be considered.