Sci­ence

Reducing Child Mortality in the Last Mile: a Randomized Social Entrepreneurship Intervention in Uganda

Abstract

The de­liv­ery of ba­sic health prod­ucts and ser­vices re­mains abysmal in many parts of the world where child mor­tal­i­ty is high. This pa­per shows the re­sults from a large-scale ran­dom­ized eval­u­a­tion of a nov­el “so­cial en­tre­pre­neur­ship” ap­proach to health care de­liv­ery. In ran­dom­ly se­lect­ed vil­lages a sales agent was lo­cal­ly re­cruit­ed and in­cen­tivized to con­duct home vis­its, ed­u­cate house­holds on es­sen­tial health be­hav­iors, pro­vide med­ical ad­vice and re­fer­rals, and sell pre­ven­tive and cu­ra­tive health prod­ucts. Re­sults af­ter three years show sub­stan­tial health im­pact: un­der-five child mor­tal­i­ty was re­duced by 27% at an es­ti­mat­ed cost of $71 per life-year saved.

Ar­ti­cle by David Yana­g­iza­wa-Drott, Mar­ti­na Bjork­man-Nyqvist, An­drea Guar­iso and Jakob Svens­son

Amer­i­can Eco­nom­ic Jour­nal: Ap­plied, Vol. 11(3), 2019