The Bamako Initiative, a controversial attempt to strengthen Primary Health Care using community financing and community participation and management was launched at a meeting of African Ministers of Health in 1987. This evaluation focuses particularly on the community financing aspects of the...

We examine the impact of removing user fees for healthcare in rural Ghana using data from a randomized experiment that includes rich information on objective measures of child health status. We find that free care increased use of formal healthcare shifting care seeking away from informal...

The extent to which removing user fees for health care in developing countries improves population health rests, in part, on how behavioural responses vary across individuals with different health needs. Using data from a randomised experiment of free care in Ghana and a measure of baseline...

User fees have been promoted in low and middle income countries in response to scarce and inequitably distributed resources and are intended to generate revenue that can be used to improve health services. Experience indicates, however, that user fees are likely to result in deterioration of...

Like many other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Ethiopia's human resource problems are impeding progress towards global health targets. These include difficulties of attracting health workers into public service employment, retaining them, and ensuring an equitable distribution between urban...

Rationale: In Africa, attrition of civil servants including health workers has reached critical rates in recent years and many countries have implemented incentive programs without an empirical basis to guide their choice of intervention. The recent increased exodus of health workers from...

Malaria is frequently referred to as a disease of the poor or a disease of poverty. A better understanding of the linkages between malaria and poverty is needed to guide the design of coherent and effective policies and tools to tackle malaria and poverty together. While recognising that there...

This paper uses two methods to compare the impact of health care payments under insurance and user fees. Concentration indices for insured and uninsured groups are computed following the indirect standardisation method to evaluate horizontal inequity in utilisation of basic health care services....