For two decades, Abt has spearheaded private sector engagement for better development outcomes, including the recent USAID Sustaining Health Outcomes through the Private Sector (SHOPS) Plus project. Lessons from this work—captured in several briefs on private sector engagement—continue to guide our work across sectors, including in agriculture and energy. In this article, we share practical tips and concrete examples for implementing partners to successfully engage the private sector.
Originally published in Marketlinks, October 13, 2022
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Private Sector Health
Bolstering Global Health Security in a Changing Environment
Environmental hazards require adaptive global health security strategies.
Beyond COVID-19: What Global Health Security Will Look Like
As leaders focus on pandemics and global health security, they should look at three related items: other diseases, social determinants of health, and logistics.
Engaging Private Health Providers to Extend the Global Availability of PMTCT Services
The past decade has seen tremendous progress in making services to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) more available in many HIV high-prevalence settings. Despite this progress, new HIV infections among pregnant women, newborns, and infants remain unacceptably high, and AIDS remains one of the leading causes of death among women of reproductive age and infants worldwide.To eliminate mother-to-child transmission, HIV programs are increasingly seeking ways to engage private actors more fully in expanding and sustaining national HIV and PMTCT responses. This technical brief presents options for engaging private sector actors in rapidly extending the availability of PMTCT services. The discussion includes successes, lessons, and challenges that can inform the efforts of governments, donors, and implementers to adapt or replicate private sector models in new settings.Abt staff members contributed to the report, including Senior Associate James J. White, Senior Analyst Sean Callahan, Associate Analyst Samantha Lint, and former Abt Analyst Helen Li.
Providing Free Pregnancy Test Kits to Community Health Workers Increases Distribution of Contraceptives: Results from an Impact Evaluation in Madagascar
To improve access to contraceptives in remote and rural areas, sub-Saharan African countries are allowing community health workers (CHWs) to distribute hormonal contraceptives. Before offering hormonal contraceptives, CHWs must determine pregnancy status but often lack a reliable way to do so. We assessed the impact of giving CHWs free pregnancy test kits on the number of new clients purchasing hormonal contraceptives from CHWs.We implemented a randomized experiment in Eastern Madagascar among CHWs who sell injectable and oral hormonal contraceptives: 622 CHWs were stratified by region and randomly assigned at the individual level. Treatment-group CHWs were given free pregnancy tests to distribute (n analyzed=272) and control-group CHWs did not receive the tests (n analyzed=263). We estimated an ordinary least squares regression model, with the monthly number of new hormonal contraceptive clients per CHW as our primary outcome.We find that providing CHWs with free pregnancy test kits increases the number of new hormonal contraceptive clients. Treatment-group CHWs provide hormonal contraceptives to 3.1 new clients per month, compared to 2.5 in the control group. This difference of 0.7 clients per month (95 percent CI 0.13–1.18; p=0.014), represents a 26 percent increase.