Over the past few years a number of institutional solutions to the pooling of health risks have been advanced in a great number of reform proposals for developing countries. The empirical arguments in favour of such recommendations have the full force of accumulated experience in countries that...

In most developing countries, government funding allocated to the health services is not sufficient to allow these services to provide appropriate health care accessible to all. Consequently, community financing has received much more attention in recent years and innovative schemes are being...

Background Performance of local health services managers at district level is crucial to ensure that health services are of good quality and cater to the health needs of the population in the area. In many Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMIC), health services managers are poorly equipped with...

Scaling-up antiretroviral treatment (ART) to socially meaningful levels in low-income countries with a high AIDS burden is constrained by (1) the continuously growing caseload of people to be maintained on long-term ART; (2) evident problems of shortage and skewed distribution in the health...

Mutual Health Organisations (MHOs) are a type of community health insurance scheme that are being developed and promoted in sub-Saharan Africa. In 1998, an MHO was organised in a rural district of Guinea to improve access to quality health care. Households paid an annual insurance fee of about...

The Bwamanda hospital insurance scheme in Zaire was launched in the mid-eighties and is one of the few well-established and documented initiatives in the field of district-based insurance schemes in sub-Saharan Africa. It was established that hospital utilization in Bwamanda is significantly...