Public notice:
The World Bank Group recognizes the critically important role that civil society plays in policy dialogue, service delivery in global health and development. We are pleased to open the call for nominations to select 7 new members of the World Bank Group’s Civil Society Consultative Group on Health, Nutrition and Population (WBG-CSCG-HNP or the Group). Continue reading
The development objective of the Sahel Women’s Empowerment and Demographic Dividend Project for Africa is to increase women and adolescent girls’ empowerment and their access to quality reproductive, child, and maternal health services in selected areas of the participating countries, including the recipients territory, and to improve regional knowledge generation and sharing as well as regional capacity and coordination. Continue reading
Blog by Onno Ruhl, Dutch national and World Bank Country Director in India, and Somil Nagpal, Senior Health Specialist. This blog was published on December 16, 2014 on the World Bank website.
Scaling up public health investments alone will not suffice. It will be equally critical to improve accountability.
On Friday, 12 December, for the first time the world celebrated universal health coverage day. On this day two years ago, the United Nations unanimously endorsed a resolution urging governments to ensure that all people can access healthcare without financial hardship.
Until now, most people in India have dug deep into their pockets to pay doctors, pharmacies and diagnostic centres. Paying in this manner—or out-of-pocket spending, as it is called—has been the norm for a long time in India but this is not how most of the world pays for healthcare. In most other countries, including some less developed ones, out-of-pocket spending is far less common than we think. It is far more likely that people pay their medical expenses in some organized manner, such as through tax-financed healthcare or some form of health insurance.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is one of Africa’s most rapidly growing economies. Since 2010 economic growth has exceeded the average for Sub-Saharan Africa by two percentage points, projected to reach over 10% growth in 2015. However, the DRC has some of the worst health and nutrition indicators in the world and is ranked last (#187) in the 2013 Human Development Report. As such, the DRC is not on track to achieve any of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), especially those related to Maternal and Child Health.
The higher level objective to 
which this project would contribute is to increase efficiency and effectiveness in the health system in order to improve human development outcomes. Improvements in efficiency and effectiveness, in turn, should boost confidence in these systems and may lead to an increase in overall investment in the social sectors.
The proposed project development objective is to improve utilization and quality of maternal and child health services in targeted areas.
The African Health Markets for Equity (AHME) is a five-year project that aims to improve health outcomes through the provision of quality private sector health care targeting the poor in Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana. In Kenya, the AHME project is supporting the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) to design, test, and scale-up the Health Insurance Subsidy Program (HISP) that will serve as a mechanism for the Government of Kenya to subsidize NHIF insurance cover for the poorest households in Kenya.
To supplement a quantitative impact evaluation of the programme, the NHIF plans to carry out a process evaluation. The aim of the process evaluation is to assess programme implementation and provide information that will help implementers determine the degree to which the HISP intervention was implemented as planned (implementation fidelity).
Netherlands for the World Bank 