INTRODUCTION Burkina Faso started nationwide community case management of malaria (CCMm) in 2010. In 2011, health center user fees for children under five were abolished in some districts. OBJECTIVE To assess the effects of concurrent implementation of CCMm and user fees abolition on treatment-seeking practices for febrile children. METHODS This is a natural experiment conducted in the dist...

BACKGROUND: In developing countries, user fees may represent an important source of revenues for private-non-for-profit hospitals, but they may also affect access, use and equity. METHODS: This survey was conducted in ten hospitals of the Uganda Catholic Medical Bureau to assess differences in user fees policies and to propose changes that would better fit with the social concern explicitly pur...

Some policy experts answer that question by arguing that budget constraints contributed to regulatory delays in the past. The reform simply relaxed those constraints by increasing the resources for new-drug review. However, there is little empirical evidence to suggest that changes in the fda’s budget influenced regulatory delays and the speed of review prior to user fees. Other policy experts ...

User fees have triggered impassioned discussions in international health over the last two decades. Promoted by a number of international organizations since the late 1980s as a strategy to finance struggling public health facilities in many lowincome countries, recent years have seen growing criticism of the impact of fees on access to health services, particularly for the poorest groups. The ...

This paper reviews the experience of implementing user fees in Africa. It describes the two main approaches to implementing user fees that have been applied in African countries, the standard and the Bamako Initiative models, and their common objectives. It summarizes the evidence concerning the impact of fees on equity, efficiency and system sustainability (as opposed to financial sustainabili...

BACKGROUND Removing user fees in primary health care services is one of the most critical policy issues being considered in Africa. User fees were introduced in many African countries during the 1980s and their impacts are well documented. Concerns regarding the negative impacts of user fees have led to a recent shift in health financing debates in Africa. Kenya is one of the countries that hav...