Nutritional status of children under five years and associated factors in 24 districts of Burkina Faso.

Malnutrition in children is a serious health problem, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, with heavy socioeconomic burdens. The prevalence of stunting remains high in Burkina Faso. There is a need to further investigate undernutrition and identify the major factors contributing to its persistence.

Do Out-of-Pocket Payments for Care for Children under 5 Persist Even in a Context of Free Healthcare in Burkina Faso? Evidence from a Cross-Sectional Population-Based Survey.

Background: In April 2016, Burkina Faso began free healthcare for children aged from 0 to 5 years. However, its implementation faces challenges, and the goal of this study is to estimate the fees paid for this child care and to determine the causes of these direct payments.

Methods: Data gathering involved 807 children aged from 0 to 5 years who had contact with the public healthcare system.

Timely completion of childhood vaccination and its predictors in Burkina Faso.

Background: Despite important progress in global vaccination coverage, many countries are still facing preventable disease outbreaks. Timely vaccination is important in getting adequate protection against disease. In light of the paucity of relevant literature, this study investigated the timely completion of childhood routine immunization and identified factors associated with timely vaccination in Burkina Faso.

Looking into the performance-based financing black box: evidence from an impact evaluation in the health sector in Cameroon.

Performance-based financing (PBF) is a complex health systems intervention aimed at improving the coverage and quality of care. Several studies have shown a positive impact of PBF on health service coverage, often coupled with improvements in quality, but relatively little is known about the mechanisms driving those results. This article presents results of a randomized impact evaluation in Cameroon designed to isolate the role of specific components of the PBF approach with four study groups: (i) PBF with explicit financial incentives linked to results, (ii) direct financing with additional resources available for health providers not linked to performance, (iii) enhanced supervision and monitoring without additional resources and (iv) a control group.

Impact of Performance-Based Financing on effective coverage for curative child health services in Burkina Faso: Evidence from a quasi-experimental design.

Objective: To evaluate the impact of Performance-Based Financing (PBF) on effective coverage of child curative health services in primary healthcare facilities in Burkina Faso.

Methods: An impact evaluation of a PBF pilot programme, using an experiment nested within a quasi-experimental design, was carried out in 12 intervention and 12 comparison districts in six regions of Burkina Faso. Across the 24 districts, primary healthcare facilities (537 both at baseline and endline) and households (baseline = 7978 endline = 7898) were surveyed.

Patterns of healthcare seeking among people reporting chronic conditions in rural sub-Saharan Africa: findings from a population-based study in Burkina Faso.

Objective: Non-communicable diseases are rapidly becoming one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, little is known about patterns of healthcare seeking among people with chronic conditions in these settings. We aimed to explore determinants of healthcare seeking among people who reported at least one chronic condition in rural Burkina Faso.

Can Combining Performance-Based Financing With Equity Measures Result in Greater Equity in Utilization of Maternal Care Services? Evidence From Burkina Faso.

Background: As countries reform health financing systems towards universal health coverage, increasing concerns emerge on the need to ensure inclusion of the most vulnerable segments of society, working to counteract existing inequities in service coverage. To this end, selected countries in sub-Saharan Africa have decided to couple performance-based financing (PBF) with demand-side equity measures. Still, evidence on the equity impacts of these more complex PBF models is largely lacking.

Quality of clinical assessment and child mortality: a three-country cross-sectional study.

This analysis describes specific gaps in the quality of health care in Central Africa and assesses the association between quality of clinical care and mortality at age 2-59 months. Regionally representative facility and household surveys for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon and Central African Republic were collected between 2012 and 2016. These data are novel in linking facilities with households in their catchment area.

Correction to: Responding to policy makers' evaluation needs: combining experimental and quasi-experimental approaches to estimate the impact of performance based financing in Burkina Faso.

Due to an error introduced during copyediting of this article [1], there are two corrections about the Figs. 1. The caption of Fig.

Responding to policy makers' evaluation needs: combining experimental and quasi-experimental approaches to estimate the impact of performance based financing in Burkina Faso.

Background: The last two decades have seen a growing recognition of the need to expand the impact evaluation toolbox from an exclusive focus on randomized controlled trials to including quasi-experimental approaches. This appears to be particularly relevant when evaluation complex health interventions embedded in real-life settings often characterized by multiple research interests, limited researcher control, concurrently implemented policies and interventions, and other internal validity-threatening circumstances. To date, however, most studies described in the literature have employed either an exclusive experimental or an exclusive quasi-experimental approach.

Inequities and their determinants in coverage of maternal health services in Burkina Faso.

Background: Poor and marginalized segments of society often display the worst health status due to limited access to health enhancing interventions. It follows that in order to enhance the health status of entire populations, inequities in access to health care services need to be addressed as an inherent element of any effort targeting Universal Health Coverage. In line with this observation and the need to generate evidence on the equity status quo in sub-Saharan Africa, we assessed the magnitude of the inequities and their determinants in coverage of maternal health services in Burkina Faso.

Determinants of unmet need for family planning in rural Burkina Faso: a multilevel logistic regression analysis.

Background: Unmet need for family planning has implications for women and their families, such as unsafe abortion, physical abuse, and poor maternal health. Contraceptive knowledge has increased across low-income settings, yet unmet need remains high with little information on the factors explaining it. This study assessed factors associated with unmet need among pregnant women in rural Burkina Faso.

Factors Associated with Contraceptive Use among Women of Reproductive Age in Rural Districts of Burkina Faso.

Given the current low contraceptive use and corresponding high levels of unwanted pregnancies leading to induced abortions and poor maternal health outcomes among rural populations, a detailed understanding of the factors that limit contraceptive use is essential. Our study investigated household and health facility factors that influence contraceptive use decisions among rural women in rural Burkina Faso. We collected data on fertile non-pregnant women in 24 rural districts in 2014.