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Freedom from Hunger is creating a new series of "learning conversations" to help very poor families understand how to obtain and use health micro-insurance, the newest form of microfinance. With funding from the International Labour Organization's Microinsurance Innovation Facility, the project will be piloted in partnership with Sinapi Aba Trust (SAT) of Ghana over the next two years. Working in the very poor Northern Region, based in Tamale, the initial phase of the project will test the impact of the education on enrollment and use of the Ghana National Health Insurance Scheme by about 3,000 women and their families.
Families living in very poor, rural areas have limited financial and household assets. Paying for health care-even for common illnesses-can devastate a family's fragile economy. These financial barriers can jeopardize health, result in disability and even cause death of a family's breadwinners. Few, if any, health insurance plans are available, much less affordable, to meet the needs of poor families.
Health micro-insurance can offer affordable and appropriate options to deal with the problem, but even when such options do exist, the poor often enroll in small numbers. For most people in the developing world, benefits and costs of insurance, and how it works, are unknown. The concept of insurance to protect against the cost of illness or accident is new and untested. Freedom from Hunger, an expert in creating behavior-change education to help people embrace new solutions, is creating a new series of Technical Learning Conversations (TLCs) for use by local partner organizations in their efforts to educate the potential "consumers" of health insurance about how it works, what it costs, and what can be the benefits.
The TLCs will use stories, role-play and visual aids to explore how insurance works, how to save for premium payments, and how to utilize available healthcare options paid for by the insurance. The goal is to increase enrollment in health micro-insurance programs that can protect both health and fragile financial assets.
Just as we evaluate all our innovations, Freedom from Hunger will conduct research to learn whether the new TLCs increase the knowledge of how health micro-insurance works and how it can be used to pay for health care, as well as whether enrollment in the available health micro-insurance program increases in the Northern Region of Ghana.
If these TLCs work as intended, Freedom from Hunger will offer them to other organizations around the world, so they can help very poor people manage the risks of ill-health.
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