Improving Access to Health Care Products and Services through the Commercial Private Sector

There is a strong rationale for health development practitioners to engage and promote the private sector in the delivery of health care products and services. Briefly, the private sector is often in a better position to assure the delivery of products and services in a sustainable manner than other actors and organizations whose continuing activities depend on donor support. For this and other reasons development organizations are looking more and more to the private sector as a vehicle towards improved health care products and services. One of the challenges however, is how to do this without distorting markets (which can take place when development organizations provide ongoing product subsidies or when they take on market functions that crowd out private enterprise). This paper looks at three programs that are promoting the sustainable delivery of health products/services through the commercial private sector.

These projects employed market development strategies that resulted in: 1) commercial sustainability in the provision of targeted healthcare products and services; 2) sustainable access to good quality products and services for at-risk or hard-to-reach target populations, and; 3) an increase in sustainable employment through growth of the private health sector.

Some lessons learned from these projects include: 1) include a goal of commercial sustainability; 2) employ a value chain framework in program design, and; 3) facilitate interventions to improve the sustainable delivery of targeted health care products and services