STANDING outside her home in central Rwanda, 19-year-old Ernestine Ituze describes falling ill last year. She was coughing violently and had lost her appetite. A community health worker diagnosed tuberculosis and Ituze was treated at the nearby government hospital, a few kilometres down a red dirt road lined with banana and mango trees. A few months later, she is healthy and continuing her studies to be an accountant.
Ituze’s treatment cost her almost nothing under Rwanda’s national health insurance programme, Mutuelles de Santé, which covers 81% of the population of 11m. Another 10% are covered by government insurance for soldiers and civil servants. At 91%, the proportion of Rwandans who have health insurance is by far the highest in Africa. Those lacking it are mostly hard-to-reach rural poor.
From the ashes of the 1994 genocide Rwanda has emerged as an unlikely public-health exemplar (see chart). In 1990 some 1,400 women died for...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2cQLAOp
EmoticonEmoticon