Impact evaluation for Health Results-Based Financing in Burkina Faso

Principal investigator: Rainer Sauerborn

Scientific coordinator: Aurélia Souares

Funding: World Bank

Partners:
Research Group in Health Economics and Health Financing, Institute of Global Health
Ministry of Health, Burkina Faso
World Bank Burkina Faso Health Team
World Bank Health Results Innovation Trust Fund

Project description:
Although studies in several countries have suggested that RBF can play a role in improving service coverage and quality, a substantial knowledge gap remains as to how individual components of RBF schemes, both jointly and independently, affect quality of care outcomes for maternal and child health. Moreover, having focused almost exclusively on the impact on the targeted services, the literature has also failed to provide sufficient evidence on the effect of RBF on health care services other than those directly targeted by the specific RBF interventions.

This study sets to fill this gap in knowledge by assessing the impact of RBF on coverage and quality of maternal and child services delivered. The study will be a blocked-by-region cluster-randomized trial (CRT), having a pre-post with comparison design. We will rely primarily on experimental control to answer the main research questions for this study.

Individual health facilities in the two selected districts in each of the five regions will be randomized to intervention or control groups. We will also have a triangulation design. This refers to the inclusion of both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis methods. The analysis of impact is only looking at intervention ii) Improving the delivery and quality of maternal and child health package through Result-Based Financing. The control group will also receive the intervention i) Supporting critical inputs for reproductive and family planning services.

Contact: Aurélia Souares (souares@uni-heidelberg.de)