Universal Health Coverage and the Public Good in Africa: An Anthropological Study
This project, funded by an ERC Starting Grant (Panel SH5), will critically approach moves towards Universal Health Coverage in 4 African countries, and associated debates about the public good.
How are seemingly universal concepts such as solidarity, obligation and the public good defined and contested in local contexts? Photo: Ruth Prince
Led by an anthropologist, it will explore how African governments are experimenting with universal health coverage and what this means for the relationship between the state and its citizens.
Objectives
We will focus on four main research questions:
- Do moves towards UHC engage with the state and citizenship, and with public and private institutions, in new ways?
- How are seemingly universal concepts such as solidarity, obligation and the public good defined and contested in local contexts?
- How do UHC reforms, such as new forms of health insurance, intersect with formal social protection policies?
- How do UHC reforms intersect with informal networks of social support, such as those composed through kinship, religious or neighborhood affiliations?
Theoretically ambitious and comparatively driven, the project aspires to a critically engaged anthropology that addresses both the politics of the possible –struggles for social transformation and the public good— and the ways progressive policies may be limited by specific social, economic and political contexts
Background
Defined by the WHO as ensuring that all people can use the health services they need without financial hardship, UHC is a powerful concept that approaches public health as a matter of justice and obligation and is included in the Sustainable Development Goals. While UHC reforms are being experimented with across the globe, UHC is particularly important in Africa given the recent history of public health on the continent. Here, the past three decades have seen fundamental shifts in the relations between the public and the private in health-care financing and provision. Structural adjustment policies undermined the role of the state and its responsibility for public health and encouraged market-based solutions to health-care, while ‘cost-sharing’ policies have pushed the burden of health-care costs onto the poor.
Financing
European Research Council (ERC), Starting Grant (StG)
Cooperation
To be developed
Start - finish
2018 - 2023
Publications
2017. Prince, Ruth J. Universal Health Coverage in the Global South: New models of healthcare and their implications for citizenship, solidarity and the public good. Michael 81: 153-172. (Open Access)
