iHRIS Retain is an open source tool to cost health worker retention interventions. People living in rural and remote areas need more skilled health workers to care for their communities. However, attracting and retaining health workers to serve in these areas is a challenge. Developed by CapacityPlus in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), iHRIS Retain is based on the WHO’s 2010 global policy recommendations on retention, which offer guidance on the different interventions in the areas of education, regulation, financial incentives, and professional development that can increase access to health workers in remote and rural areas through improved retention. iHRIS Retain guides users through the costing process step by step, collecting necessary data, calculating the costs of interventions, and comparing costs to available funding. The resulting information can then be used to develop retention strategies at the district, regional, or national level.
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The Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit is designed to help countries determine what would motivate health workers to accept and remain in rural posts. It builds on the World Health Organization global policy recommendations for rural retention and is based on the discrete choice experiment (DCE), a powerful research method that identifies the trade-offs professionals are willing to make between specific job characteristics and determines their preferences for various incentive packages, including the probability of accepting a post in a rural facility. Employing a simplified version of the DCE methodology, the toolkit guides HR managers through the survey process to quickly assess health students’ and health workers’ motivational preferences to accept a position and continue working in underserved facilities. The results can be used to create evidence-based incentive packages that are appropriate within a country’s health labor market. 
