[EQ] Reaching the Poor Policy Briefs: Cambodia - Mexico

Reaching the Poor Policy Brief Series

The World Bank - March 2008

New Reaching the Poor Policy Brief Series, are now available. This installment of two briefs focuses on addressing demand  side health care financing, with two cases from Cambodia and Mexico.  

English versions of this installment are attached and electronic files of these four new briefs will be made available in English, French, Spanish and Russian
World  Bank’s  website:  http://go.worldbank.org/PUJ2E7T1Z0

Health Insurance Initiatives

·         Mexico (Seguro):  Providing Subsidized Health Insurance for the Poor
English (pdf 132kb) | French (pdf 134kb) | Spanish (pdf 119kb) | Russian (pdf 851kb)

Public Private Partnerships

·         Cambodia: Contracting Health Care Services for the Rural Poor
English (pdf 150kb) | French (PDF 173kb) | Spanish (PDF 157kb) | Russian (PDF 1MB)

This policy brief series is produced by the World Bank Institute with financial support from the Government of the Netherlands.

Motivation:  
It  has  been  known  for  too  long  that  the  poor and socially vulnerable  die  earlier  and  suffer  more  from  diseases, high fertility, and malnutrition,  than  the  better-off in most countries.  This fact has motivated bigger investments in the health sector on the naïve assumption that spending on health is spending on the poor.  The overwhelming evidence in the last 10 years have  shown  that  simply  spending  more  on health does not  necessarily equal reaching and helping the poor.  The Reaching the Poor Program has sought to find evidence that spending in health can be pro-poor and to begin to understand the conditions necessary to attack inequality.

Vigilance,  Hope,  and  Hard  Work  The  research phase of the Reaching the Poor Program  funded  by the World Bank, with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation  and  the  Dutch  and  Swedish  Governments, supported evaluations of health  programs.   A  critical  finding  of  the research phase was that health programs  do  not  have  to  be  pro-rich.  Addressing and reversing inequality, however,  is  not easy.
Common success characteristics include:
(i)   an explicit objective  of  reaching  the  poor; 
(ii)  analysis of the bottlenecks facing the poor;  
(iii) adapting   solutions   to   address   local   conditions; 
(iv) experimentation;
(v)  monitoring; and
(vi) patience.

Each Brief will highlight the main achievements of successful attempts to address health service use inequality. They are short and policy oriented, but they are based on longer and technical evaluation documents.   The wide variety of policy instruments that have proven successful shows that there is not one way of addressing inequality, but that motivated policy makers and advocates can make a difference.

Abdo Yazbeck, Lead Health Economist
World Bank Institute, the World Bank

The  RPP  II  Team  (in alphabetical order):  Ann Goldman, Jo Hindriks, Michelle Morris, Mary Mugala, Tanya Ringland, Chialing Yang and Abdo Yazbeck

 

 

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