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Wednesday, June 20, 2012

The Pumwani Maternity Ward

Today we visited a maternity ward in a poor area of Nairobi to get a sense of the scale of the population explosion in Kenya, and the level of care for this population.

The charge for maternity care at this hospital is 3,000 shillings for a normal birth, and 6,000 shillings for a C-section, plus 400 shillings per day for room charges. (If you cannot pay at the end, they keep you for two weeks -- room charges accumulate -- then eventually release you. About 2% do not pay, and that comes to around a million shillings per month.)

Maternity Ward 004Entrance

I was interested in a comment made during a presentation prior to the visit that health care for the poor is allocated by a voucher system. The vouchers cost 100 shillings, or a $1.25, That doesn't seem like a lot, but the population we visited yesterday, for example, is excluded by this practice (secondary options for care are not very good).

Maternity Ward 022Post-natal training

I asked the government official making the presentation why they chose to allocate care in this way. The money they collect is nothing -- that can't be it -- it seems like an intentional exclusion of the lowest income population. The answer: they can't afford to cover everyone. Then why exclude this population? Why not adopt a different allocation mechanism that targets very specific areas of need? Why do they think this is the best way to allocate the money? There was an answer, but it didn't really address the question, and it left as many questions as it answered.

Maternity Ward 008These will be occupied soon

I was left wondering how the voucher system came to be in the first place. I asked, again words were spoken, but there was no answer. Is this, for example, the result of some donor saying funds will be given, and insisting on an allocation mechanism that involves vouchers (it worked in Kenya, and it can work in the US too!)? Was it from economists in Kenya? I wish I had the answers.

Maternity Ward 017I bet this is really effective

Another comment made by the director of the maternity ward interested me as well. We were told that every other hospital gets 2 million shillings per month to cover maintenance, gardening, and other expenses, but this one does not. We asked why, and the answer was: he wished he could tell us, but he didn't know. I suspect the money is ending up in someone's pocket, but who knows? Another puzzle is that they receive very little donation money (though this could have been a pitch to donors that exaggerated the conditions so that we would write about it -- there was no way to tell). But this is a place where donations could do a whole lot of good, and it's hard to imagine that some NGO wouldn't want to do this (there is a funder on the trip who thought donors should be salivating over this place). But donors do check before giving money, especially very large sums, and if the money is not epected to end up where it was intended to go, then they would be hesitant to begin a relationship. We were all puzzled by why donors shied away, and we tried hard to find out why. But, once again, there was no good answer, only more questions.

I'm finding that a lot here.

[We also had a presentation on female genital mutilation, or female circumcision as some insist on calling it, and it seemed to me it could be characterized, at least in part, as a multiple equilibrium, collective action problem with tipping points. So I asked what they knew about tipping points -- the point where the social pressure switches from doing it to not having it done as fewer and fewer have the procedure done to them, but that will have to wait -- we have to catch a plane to Lake Victoria to meet the CDC and see other things, like hippos coming to get water (apparently like clockwork) and we depart at 6 am. That's in five hours.]

    Posted by on Wednesday, June 20, 2012 at 03:24 AM in Development, Economics, Health Care | Permalink  Comments (9)


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