A recent study conducted by Pascaline Dupas & Radhika Jain, published in June 2021, reports gender disparities within the Bhamashah Swasthya Bima Yojana (BSBY), a government health insurance program that targets 46 million poor individuals in Rajasthan, India. The...
Disha Bhanot, Assistant Professor at SP Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai writes about how COVID-19 has exposed the dark underbelly of our healthcare system and health insurance schemes may have little chance of achieving sustained benefits. With an...
Burkina Faso has obtained financing from the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) to implement a project to strengthen primary healthcare in order to improve health and nutrition. At an estimated cost of FCFA 16.38 billion, the IDB contributed FCFA 15.37 billion. This sum...
On Tuesday, the Universal Health Coverage Agency (ANACMU) and the National Office for Wards of the Nation (ONPN) signed a partnership agreement aimed at extending health care to these wards. According to ONPN Director Mamadou Saliou Daillo, "this partnership agreement...
This budget brief reviews the Malawi national budget 2020/21 and its relation to health. Specifically, the brief analyzes the size and composition of the National Budget, with a special focus on allocations to key social sectors that benefit children. The brief also...
The introduction of the free health care initiative in 2010, which removed user fees for pregnant women, lactating mothers and children under five was supported by earlier evidence that showed health-related financial costs were a major barrier to mothers and children...
In 2010 the Government of Sierra Leone established the Free Health Care Initiative removing user fees (on drugs and consultations) for pregnant women, lactating mothers and children under five. The major objective of the scheme, as far as health financing was...
The COVID-19 pandemic poses clear threats to Ethiopia’s reforms and relatively strong economic growth, with “wide-ranging and serious” according to a UN report. The report assesses the devastating social and economic dimensions of the COVID-19 crisis and sets out the...
World Bank’s High-Frequency Phone Surveys on COVID-19, 2020 (HFPS) and the Ethiopia Socioeconomic Survey, 2018-19 (ESS) are used to assess whether families got help during the pandemic, how quickly they got it, and whether government assistance benefited the...
The Director of Onusida in Cameroon deplores the fact that 70% of payments for HIV/AIDS-related services are still borne by households. This poses a real problem of access to care for vulnerable people. However, the elimination of fees for HIV-AIDS services, which had...
What has the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic been on poverty in Zambia, and how can social protection programs mitigate these effects? This paper estimates the pre-pandemic poverty level in Zambia and then simulates the distributional impact of COVID-19 in the...
High levels of out-of-pocket spending have been shown to be one of the biggest health reasons people fall into poverty when accessing care, or choose to forgo care. Globally it is estimated that 100 million people are pushed into poverty every year due to exorbitant...
Access to affordable family planning is an essential component of universal health coverage (UHC) as it is one of the most effective interventions that have shown to reduce maternal and under- mortality rates. For Zambia, to include Family Planning (FP) in the...
For Gilbert Tshibangu, a teacher at the Institut Supérieur du Commerce in Kinshasa, this is the first time that an elected President of the DRC has expressed his willingness to offer his people universal health coverage. On the initiative of President Félix...
General Boubacar Dembele can be proud of his plea. He now has the backing of Mali's parliamentarians to extend compulsory health insurance benefits to several of Mali's underprivileged groups. The head of the national health insurance fund is confident that...
