IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/lunewp/2007_011.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Decentralized Provision of Primary Healthcare in Rural Bangladesh – a Study of Government Facilities

Author

Listed:
  • Ahmad, Alia

    (Department of Economics, Lund University)

  • Bose, Manik

    (World Fish Center)

  • Persson, Therése Hindman

    (Dovre Group)

Abstract

Bangladesh has made significant progress in health indicators in recent years in spite of her low level of income. This is mainly due to the commitment of the state supported by donors in providing preventive care with respect to child health and family planning. However, there are serious problems related to both access and quality of curative care that hurt the poor most. Infrastructures for service delivery exist at local level in rural areas but they function inefficiently. This paper deals with the systemic weaknesses of decentralized service provision of primary healthcare in Bangladesh and focuses on accountability links between different actors and functions of delegation, finance, performance, information and enforcement. The study is based on facility- and household-based data collected during 2005 in Khulna Division. The main findings of the study are: the health system in rural areas represents deconcentration rather than decentralization of central government functions where inter-sectoral discipline works poorly; local health providers are not accountable to local government, and poor citizens/clients are neither aware of their rights nor are capable of expressing their needs as effective channels do not exist.

Suggested Citation

  • Ahmad, Alia & Bose, Manik & Persson, Therése Hindman, 2007. "Decentralized Provision of Primary Healthcare in Rural Bangladesh – a Study of Government Facilities," Working Papers 2007:11, Lund University, Department of Economics, revised 26 Jun 2007.
  • Handle: RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2007_011
    Note: In footnote 1 the Conference in Bergen will be held in November
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://project.nek.lu.se/publications/workpap/Papers/WP07_11.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    decentralization; accountability; governance; primary healthcare;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Behavior
    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2007_011. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Prakriti Thami (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/delunse.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.