Costs of maternity leave to support breastfeeding; Brazil, Ghana and Mexico.

Objective: To develop a method to assess the cost of extending the duration of maternity leave for formally-employed women at the national level and apply it in Brazil, Ghana and Mexico.

Methods: We adapted a World Bank costing method into a five-step method to estimate the costs of extending the length of maternity leave mandates. Our method used the unit cost of maternity leave based on working women's weekly wages; the number of additional weeks of maternity leave to be analysed for a given year; and the weighted population of women of reproductive and legal working age in a given country in that year.