Coping with private health markets - regulatory ineffectiveness in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

In many low-income countries, while a substantial proportion of health care is privately provided, government capacity to develop and enforce regulations to ensure adequate quality of care is often extremely limited. There are few studies which provide a detailed examination of regulation in a low-income country context or consider how, or to what extent, regulation can be used as a mechanism to achieve policy goals. In order to fill this gap, the 1995 meeting of the Public Private Mix Collaborative Research Network (PPMNet) developed a comparative research framework to explore these issues. This chapter discusses the implications of results from studies undertaken in two countries: Tanzania and Zimbabwe. The chapter outlines the research methods used and an overview of the main research findings, and then considers how and where current implementation of regulation can be strengthened. The detailed study results may be found in a number of papers, including Hongoro et al. (2000), Hongoro and Kumaranayake (2000), Kumaranayake et al. (2000), Mujinja et al. (1999), Mujinja et al. (Chapter 2 of this book), and Mpembeni et al. (2000)