This short dissemination note provides a synthesis of key results from a recent study on access to infrastructure services in Africa. Using Demographic and Health Surveys from 22 countries that have conducted at least two such surveys between 1990 and 2005, we provide comparable estimates over...

This paper relies on facilities and household survey data to estimate the ‘market share’ of faith-inspired institutions (FIIs) in the provision of health care services in Africa. While estimates based on facilities data, especially for hospitals, often suggest that the market share of FIIs...

This paper considers the evidence on the comparative extent to which faith-based civil society organizations (FB-CSOs) have benefited from increased funding related to the HIV/AIDS response in Africa. First, we review the literature on whether FB-CSOs have benefited from such funding, and find...

Faith-inspired institutions (FIIs) commonly have as their stated mission a desire to provide quality health services to all, and in particular a commitment to serve the poor, for example, by providing services in remote areas where there are none, or by making services more affordable for those...

The issue of whether faith-inspired providers are able to reach the poor depends in part on the cost of the health services provided. This paper relies on recent nationally representative household surveys for sub-Saharan African countries to assess to what extent the cost of healthcare is a...

Why does female genital cutting (FGC) persist in certain places while has declined elsewhere? Using survey data from the Gambia, we study an important aspect of the persistence of FGC, namely the relationship between (i) whether a woman has undergone FGC and (ii) her support for the practice....

This paper has two objectives. The first is to provide a review of the discourses about the religious response to HIV/AIDS in Africa that have emerged from the recent literature, how these discourses has changed over time (from religiophobia to a cautious recognition of the comparative value of...

This paper provides results from qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2010 in Burkina Faso to understand the factors that lead households to rely on traditional as opposed to modern health providers, and within modern providers, on faith-inspired as opposed to public facilities. While there is an...

Supermarkets, specialized wholesalers, and processors and agro-exporters’ agricultural value chains have begun to transform the marketing channels into which smallholder farmers sell produce in low-income economies. We develop a conceptual framework through which to study contracting between...

There are often large regional differences in poverty and other social indicators within a country. But geographic poverty profiles based on household surveys tend to be limited to broad areas because survey sample sizes are too small to permit analysts to construct valid estimates of poverty at...