This report reviews recent trends in household access to infrastructure services and associated budgetary expenditures in Africa. It is based on a pooled database that draws upon the entire body of household surveys conducted in sub-Saharan Africa in the last 15 years.

This short dissemination note provides a synthesis of key results from a recent study on access to infrastructure services in Africa. Using Demographic and Health Surveys from 22 countries that have conducted at least two such surveys between 1990 and 2005, we provide comparable estimates over...

The issue of whether faith-inspired providers are able to reach the poor depends in part on the cost of the health services provided. This paper relies on recent nationally representative household surveys for sub-Saharan African countries to assess to what extent the cost of healthcare is a...

Apart from fiscal measures, another initiative taken by the government of Liberia to respond to the economic crisis consisted in the launch of a cash for work temporary employment program. This part of the study consists of three chapters devoted to the analysis of the program. First, in this...

This paper relies on household survey data as well as qualitative fieldwork to answer two questions about the services provided by faith-inspired health care providers in Ghana: how satisfied are patients with the services received?; and why are patients choosing faith-inspired providers for...

To help households cope with the recent economic crisis, and especially the increase in food prices, the government of Liberia announced a number of fiscal measures. A first measure was to implement a temporary exoneration of import duties on food products, and especially imported rice. A second...

This chapter was originally drafted in 2007 to inform the diagnostic of Liberia’s first Poverty Reduction Strategy. It is based on an analysis of the Core Welfare Questionnaire Indicator survey implemented in 2007 by Liberia’s Institute of Statistics and Geo-Information Services. The chapter...

This chapter was written in 2007 in order to inform the diagnostic of Liberia’s Poverty Reduction Strategy. Little has been written on the education system in Liberia since the start of the conflict in large part because of lack of good data. The chapter provides a diagnostic of Liberia’s...

As for education, little has been written on the health system in Liberia since the start of the conflict in large part because of lack of good data. This chapter was also written in 2007 to inform the diagnostic of Liberia’s Poverty Reduction Strategy. It provides a diagnostic of Liberia’s...

Faith-inspired institutions (FIIs) commonly have as their stated mission a desire to provide quality health services to all, and in particular a commitment to serve the poor, for example, by providing services in remote areas where there are none, or by making services more affordable for those...