Boosting Maternal Health Care Performance through Incentives

Bangladesh is rapidly progressing towards achieving 8 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The targets include Reducing Child Mortality and Improving Maternal Health. However, one of the barriers to achieving these targets is the inadequacy of needed maternal and neonatal health care facilities. Census and studies have indicated that the major cause for this low utilization of professional services is linked with financial factors. Scarcity of healthcare service providers as well as their poor performance is also contributing to this problem.

To tackle this situation, the Government of Bangladesh has adopted two performance based financing programs— Demand-Side Financing (DSF) and Pay-for-Performance (P4P).

DSF provides financial support to poor women for receiving safe delivery services as well as case based incentives to service providers. P4P is HR project that evaluates professional performance; it sets target for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (MNCH) related service providers and provides incentives if their performance meet the target or exceed it.

Find out more: Innovative Financing through Pay-for-Performance for Providers to Improve Quality of Care in Bangladesh, by Population Council, Bangladesh.