Main navigation
Content
Social health protection
According to the World Health Organization, 100 million people fall under the poverty line every year because they or their family members require health services and must pay for them out of their own pocket. Even more poor people decide to not seek the health care they actually need so as to avoid the costs they would incur. A vicious cycle of poverty and illness results: untreated conditions affect people’s ability to work and can lead to a loss of income and financial hardship. This, in turn, perpetuates poor health and often fosters the adoption of negative coping strategies, such as child labour.
Effective social health protection systems can mitigate this problem and are a crucial pillar of universal health coverage. This is why German Development Cooperation supports the following measures with its cooperation partners:
- Supporting the establishment of national, mandatory social health insurance systems.
- Promoting the networking and mutual learning and exchange between countries that are in the process of establishing social health protection systems (e.g. through the P4H Social Health Protection Network).
- Developing community-based health insurance funds.
- Ensuring that especially poor and disadvantaged population groups gain access to basic health services, for example through targeted voucher systems.
Selected readings from the Healthy DEvelopments portal
- On a fast track to Universal Health Coverage in Pakistan (InFocus, 2020)
- Piloting a social health protection scheme for Bangladesh’s poor (In focus article, 2018)
- Working life is hard. Make it safe! (In focus, 2018)
- Towards universal coverage in the majority world (Knowledge-Learning-Innovation Brief, GIZ, 2016)
- Cambodia’s integrated Social Health Protection Scheme (Working paper, GIZ, 2017)
- Health insurance for India’s poor (Case study, GHPC, 2014)
- Brokering social consensus: Germany’s support to social health insurance reform in Mongolia (Case study, GHPC, 2014)
- Vouchers: making motherhood safer for Kenya’s poorest women (Case study, GHPC, 2012)
- Open source software for social health insurance (In focus article, 2017)
- High Level Policy Dialogue for Universal Health Coverage in Zambia (In focus article, 2016)
- Making Leaders more effective (In focus article, 2015)
- Indonesia’s roadmap to universal health coverage: A story of Indonesian-German collaboration (In focus article, 2015)
- Has RSBY made a difference for India’s women and girls? (GIZ, 2017)
Social health protection on other German Development Cooperation websites
- BMZ: Social Protection
- GIZ: Introduction and development of social health insurance schemes - external link, new window
- P4H Social Health Protection Network - external link, new window