Africa's Health Burden: Assessing the Role of Community in Healthcare Delivery
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Date
2015
Authors
Quadri, MaryamOmolara
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Abstract
The enormous health challenges confronting Africa and the lack of capacity of the health systems to address those challenges stimulate a new thinking on the role of the community in improving health systems’ performance in Africa. The health systems must respond effectively to these challenges if Africa as a continent must be free of all the burden of ill-health. The decline in most health indicators of some African countries were as a result of the inability of their health systems to address health problems confronting them. A failure of health service delivery in Africa is due to dysfunctional organization of the health system. The inadequacy of community involvement in community health services or the decline of the community participation in health planning and management has resulted in the poor performance of the health care system and its failure to solve the basic health problems in some countries. This paper using a case study of health care delivery in Lagos state, Nigeria examines the degree to which the people are involved in health care delivery and the implications for their health needs. The paper concludes that, since development is about people and their participation in the process that leads to such, effective participation of people especially at the community level is necessary to achieve development.
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Keywords
community participation, health burden, health system, development
Citation
Quadri, M. O. (2015). Africa’s health burden: Assessing the role of community in health care delivery. Journal of Pan African Studies, 8(1), 19-36.