Shift in funding of healthcare should benefit rural people too
A doctor attends to a child. There is no direct effort to focus on rural areas despite being in dire need of healthcare services. Photo/FILE
Donor support for the local healthcare sector has for long been channelled through the public sector.
The government has received more than 90 per cent of such funds over the last four decades in terms of grants, low interest loans and donations.
However, there is a shift in the trend with some of the funds going to the private sector. The intended outcome is a synergistic effect on the public sector improvement.
In March the Private Sector Partnership for Health (PSP4H), one such outfit, launched its activities.
The project, funded by the British government through DFiD, seeks to make the private sector more robust.
In a break from traditional approaches, the project targets only for profit enterprises in healthcare. Its other out of the box approach is that it does not offer money or funding for capital or infrastructural support for selected entities. On the sidelines of the event, launched by the British Ambassador, we caught up with Dorothy Mbuvi, the project’s communication officer.
“Sometimes what a business needs is a critical evaluation of its weaknesses and not more money,” she said.
This approach, where aid is offered only in technical and marketing terms, is arrived at from a major observation: many small enterprises think funds are their biggest need whereas that may not be the case.
Thematic areas
Sometimes getting help to fine-tune your operations, increase market visibility and technical operations is more important than funds. This informs PSP4H’s break from conventional “funding” approaches.
PSP4H’s thematic areas include healthcare financial services, improvement of maternal and child health, strengthening of the supply chain, and dealing with non-communicable diseases.
Emphasis is on strengthening business skills of enterprises. To qualify, an enterprise must be for profit. In addition, it must address needs of the poor through innovative approaches. Finally, the innovation must be sustainable and scalable for it to benefit a bigger group.
However, like the other funds PSP4H’s approach primarily targets urban areas. There is no direct effort to focus on rural areas despite being in dire need of healthcare services.
According to Ms Mbuvi, robust urban area private sector growth will ultimately spill over to rural areas.
As to whether PSP4H will have specific achievements, she said that being an initial approach impact may not be easily quantifiable.
In the long term, the project will also seek to promote policy changes especially on the entrepreneurial skills gap among healthcare entrepreneurs.
This will hopefully lead to such skills being introduced in the curricula of colleges and universities.
