Afya Credit Incentive for Improved Maternal and Child Health

Afya credit incentive for improved maternal and child health

The project aims to test whether well-designed and targeted financial incentives can succeed in changing hard-to-change behaviours; in this case using maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH) services. The project has been developed in response to Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s “Grand Challenges in Global Health”, under the topic of “inciting healthy behaviours”.

Overview

In developing countries, many women give birth at home and rarely see a trained healthcare provider before or after the baby’s birth. This is true even when the health facilities are close to where the women live. Approximately 50 percent of newborn deaths occur on the first day of life; most of these are preventable if women attend clinics and give birth at health facilities. In this Explorations-phase project, we will test the role of cash incentives in overcoming the complex barriers to MNCH attendance and in sustaining a change towards health-seeking behaviour in the study population.

While the pilot focuses on MNCH services, the underlying concept is replicable to several other fields, including work on cookstoves and sanitation, where technologies for reducing health burdens exist but people do not use them.

Conditional cash transfers to retain rural Kenyan women in the continuum of care during pregnancy, birth and the postnatal period: protocol for a cluster randomized controlled trial

Protocol on the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of conditional cash transfers in facilitating health visits and promoting maternal and child health.

Economic evaluation of the Afya trial in Kenya for retaining women in pre- and postnatal care

Read the protocol for an economic evaluation of the Afya project in Kenya, which uses cash transfers to encourage women to take up pre- and postnatal care.

Journal articles
Health
27 November 2019
Kenya

Woman in black hijab and orange dress with long-strapped shoulder bag texting on phone with red-roofed white pavilion behind her standing next to green plant, Kenya

Effectiveness of conditional cash transfers (Afya credits incentive) to retain women in the continuum of care during pregnancy, birth and the postnatal period in Kenya: a cluster-randomised trial

This article assesses the impact of a project in Kenya that made cash transfers to retain women in antenatal care, delivery at facility and postnatal care.