Scaling bundled health services in rural Sierra Leone
Remote rural households often face severe barriers in accessing basic preventive healthcare. In Sierra Leone, reaching a health facility can take roughly two hours on foot in many rural areas, even where vaccines are available and confidence in vaccines is high. This creates a practical access problem: many preventive services require repeated contact with the health system, but each visit is difficult for households living far from clinics.
Authors
Maarten Voors
Associate Professor, Wageningen University
Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak
Jerome Kasoff ’54 Professor of Management and Economics, Yale University
Uday Wadehra
Research Manager, University of Oxford
Sara Gomez-Mesa
MRes Economics student, London School of Economics and Political Science
Dr. Desmond Maada Kangbai
Program Manager, Expanded Programme on Immunization at the Ministry of Health & Associate Lecturer, Njala UniversitySarah Cundy
Researcher, Yale University-
Scaling-bundled-health-services -in-rural-Sierra-Leone-SLE-24143.pdf
PDF document • 185.04 KB
- Bundled outreach substantially increased uptake of several preventive health services in remote rural Sierra Leone.
- The largest gains were found for HPV vaccination, vitamin A supplementation and deworming, and the intervention also reduced the share of zero-dose children, especially among younger children.
- Routine childhood immunisation also improved, but gains were more modest for some early multi-dose vaccines, pointing to operational frictions at the point of delivery.