Mapping religious health assets: Are faith-inspired facilities located in poor areas in Ghana?

It has long been argued that faith-inspired health facilities serve the poor in priority in sub-Saharan Africa, in part by being located in remote and poor areas where the reach of government services may remain limited. Unfortunately, proper empirical evidence to back up such claims is rarely available. In this paper, we use geographic poverty mapping techniques to assess whether the facilities associated with the Christian Health Association of Ghana (CHAG) are located in poor areas. From the point of view of CHAG which may look only at the distribution of its facilities and hospital beds in the districts where it is active, there is some evidence that it tends to serve poorer areas in priority. But from the point of view of a national government or outside observer looking at the distribution of CHAG facilities and hospital beds in the country as a whole, the relationship is weaker, in part because CHAG does not have facilities and hospital beds in some relatively poor districts. Thus, while there is some evidence that CHAG facilities do serve poor areas, the evidence is weaker than one might have expected.