Bringing together health and poverty reduction agendas

The question of how to meet the health-related needs of the very poor brings two distinct strands of thinking together. One is reducing the burden of disease, the focus of health policy, and the other is social protection, which focuses on giving assistance to individuals, households and communities that experience temporary or long-term poverty so that they can better manage risk and increase their security.

This section considers the linkages between health and social protection and reviews different frameworks for analysing health and the very poor.  It also looks at social protection in transition economies and the difficulties in operationalising joint health and social protection agendas.

Four dimensions of analysis

An analysis of health and poverty can be separated into at least four 'blocks' and these provide the structure of this dossier.

• Fist there is a need to know the conditions in which households live: who are the very poor; what is their livelihood, and what specific challenges do they face in terms of health
• Health care expenditures are a major issue for poor people and they may draw on various entitlements when they require health care. Both formal and informal health assistance schemes need to be looked at, especially those that are targeted at the very poor
• Provider behaviour is a major determinant of the quality of services that people receive and strategies must focus on improving provider performance as well as access to health care
  
• Finally, it is important to put analysis of health and poverty into context at national and international levels. What are the pro-poor health policies? How policies be integrated in order to develop policies that meet the health related needs of the very poor?