Africa's Changing Markets for Health and Veterinary Services

Africa's Changing Markets for Health and Veterinary Services
Author: David K. Leonard
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2000
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780312232665

Under the pressure of Structural Adjustment, health and veterinary services in Africa have increasingly relied on user fees and private markets. In this book, a collaborative group of African and American physicians, veterinarians, and social scientists explore the different experiences of the two services with marketization through survey research in six African countries. They demonstrate that the markets for these services will function well only if important problems in the institutions that govern them are solved.

Markets of Well-being

Markets of Well-being
Author: Marleen Dekker
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2010-12-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004201289

Health and healing are distinctive domains as far as the pursuit of people’s well-being is concerned. In Africa, both fields have increasingly become subject to monetization and commodification, in short, the market. Based on extensive fieldwork in nine African countries by scholars with diverse academic backgrounds, this volume offers different perspectives on the emerging markets and the way medical staff, patients, households and institutions navigate them in their quest for well-being. By presenting a detailed economic ethnography of this multifacetted process of navigating the market, the book sets a new agenda for research as a result of the current predicaments facing health and healing in African societies.

African Health Leaders

African Health Leaders
Author: Francis Omaswa
Publisher:
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2014
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0198703325

Most accounts of health and healthcare in Africa are written by foreigners. African Health Leaders: Making Change and Claiming the Future redresses the balance. Written by Africans, who have themselves led improvements in their own countries, the book discusses the creativity, innovation and leadership that has been involved tackling everything from HIV/AIDs, to maternal, and child mortality and neglected tropical diseases. It celebrates their achievements and shows how, over three generations, African health leaders are creating a distinctively African vision of health and health systems. The book reveals how African Health Leaders are claiming the future - in Africa, but also by sharing their insights and knowledge globally and contributing fully to improving health throughout the world. It illustrates how African leadership can enable foreign agencies and individuals working in Africa to avoid all those misunderstandings and misinterpretations of culture and context which lead to wasted efforts and frustrated hopes. African Health Leaders challenges Africans to do more for themselves; build on success; tackle weak governance, corrupt systems and low expectations and claim the future. It sets out what Africa needs from the rest of the world in the spirit of global solidarity - not primarily in aid, but through investment, collaboration, partnership and co-development. It concludes with a vision for improvement based on three foundations: an understanding that 'health is made at home'; the determination to offer access to health services for everyone; and an insistence on the pursuit of quality.

Governing Health Systems in Africa

Governing Health Systems in Africa
Author: Martyn Sama
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2008
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 2869781822

Drawing on various disciplinary perspectives, this book re-focuses the debate on what makes a good health system, with a view to clarifying the uses of social science research in thinking about health care issues in Africa. The explosion of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the persistence of malaria as a major killer, and the resurgence of diseases like tuberculosis which were previously under control, have brought about changes in the health system, with implications for its governance, especially in view of the diminished capacity of the public health facilities to cope with a complex range of expanded needs. Government responsibilities and objectives in the health sector have been redefined, with private sector entities (both for profit and not-for profit) playing an increasingly visible role in health care provisions. The reasons for collaborative patterns vary, but chronic under-funding of publicly financed health services is often an important factor. Processes of decentralisation and health sector reforms have had mixed effects on health care system performance; while private health insurance markets and private clinics are pointers to a growing stratification of the health market, in line with the intensified income and social differentiation that has occurred over the last two decades.These developments call for health sector reforms.