Health Care Financing in African: What does NHA Estimates Do Reveal about the Distribution of Financial Burden?

This paper, utilizing National Health Accounts framework attempts a profile of the health financing situation Sub-Saharan Africa countries. While Africa accounts for less than 0.9 percent of global health spending, the region carries over 43% of global burden of communicable diseases. The households bear the highest burden of healthcare financing, accounting for between 72% and 99% of private sources. The public and external sources account for around 33% and 30% of total health expenditure, respectively. With high poverty incidence in the continent, households are easily exposed to catastrophic spending risk. This calls for health financing reforms that emphasis pooling mechanism, especially social health insurance. Deviance to the Alma Alta Declaration, which laid precedence on preventive healthcare, curative healthcare generally, dominates in the allocation of healthcare funds. This has implication on the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare delivery in African countries. Public facilities play a dominant role in provision of healthcare, which is arguably supported by the need to achieve greater equity in healthcare delivery. However, with the growing wave of public-private-partnership initiatives, it may be intuitively wise and efficient to increase private participation in the provision of healthcare.