Availability of essential health services in post-conflict Liberia

The aim of this paper is to describe the availability of essential health services in rural Liberia five years after the end of the civil war. The services examined here – integrated management of childhood illness, basic emergency obstetric care, artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) for malaria, HIV counselling and testing and mental health care – are part of the basic package of health services and address priority health conditions in Liberia.

We use a combination of population- and facility-level data to describe the availability of clinic inputs (infrastructure equipment and human resources) and scope of services available to villagers at their nearest health-care facility. We further map the provision of each service and propose potential reasons for asymmetries in distribution. Liberia’s experience may be instructive for other countries emerging from conflict.