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Grantee
Freedom from Hunger is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 1946 and working in 17 countries in West Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Its mission is to bring innovative and sustainable ‘self-help’ solutions to the fight against chronic hunger and poverty. Its core activities focus on designing and disseminating integrated financial services and lifeskills training that equip the rural poor to escape poverty and achieve household food security. The organization’s experience and expertise extend across multiple sectors that address the causes of chronic hunger and poverty, including microfinance, livelihood development, health and nutrition, household food security and empowerment of women.
Project Summary
- Project name: Health microinsurance consumer education
- Project start date: May 2009
- Duration: January 2012
- Country: To be determined (likely West Africa or Latin America)
Beneficiaries
The project will target one or more vulnerable groups amongst the ‘chronically hungry poor’ who lack access to health insurance and who have correspondingly poor health status. The groups have below-poverty-level incomes, high levels of illiteracy, and include predominantly women and families.
Project Description
Although a diverse set of actors is currently involved in providing health microinsurance to low-income people, reach and enrolment have been limited, particularly in rural areas. For most low-income people in the developing world, the concept of insurance—to protect against the cost of illness, accident and extended ill health—is new, untested, and not well understood.
To fill the gap, Freedom from Hunger seeks to develop a consumer health microinsurance module that will provide microinsurers, MFIs, and other organizations with an effective educational tool to equip low-income people to make informed and wise decisions and help them evaluate, access, and effectively utilize available health insurance products.
In the first phase of the project, Freedom from Hunger will design, develop, and field-test a flexible, adaptable, and replicable consumer education module targeted for low- income families; in a second phase, Freedom from Hunger will evaluate the impact of the module in collaboration with a health microinsurance scheme. The analysis aims to look at changes in consumer health-insurance knowledge; rate of enrolment or take-up; disenrollment; and ability of consumers to access and utilize the services their policies would cover.
Key Challenges
A key challenge is to secure a collaborative partnership with a health microinsurance scheme to effectively adapt the education module and access reliable member enrolment, retention, and other relevant health claims data.
Learning Agenda
- How can a consumer health education module be developed for use with low-income consumers that incorporates generic information on the value of health insurance, and that is designed with built-in modularity to enable replication by health microinsurance providers across a range of different settings, sponsors, and schemes?
- Does the delivery of a series of technical learning conversations based on adult learning principles measurably increase the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of poor consumers about the advantages of health micro-insurance, and how the insurance program works to provide financial protection to the enrollee and/or the family?
- What is the added value of consumer education for insurance uptake, retention, access to and use of covered health benefits, and the capacity of consumers to use health insurance to help manage the financial risks of illness and poor health?
More information on the project
Website of the grantee:
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