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Healthy Partnerships: How Governments Can Engage the Private Sector

This report was launched at the Private Sector Working Group (PSWG) annual meeting on June 17, 2011 by Connor Spreng of the World Bank. Health systems across Africa are in urgent need of improvement. The public sector should not be expected to shoulder the burden of directly providing the needed services alone, nor can it, given the current realities of African health systems. Therefore to achieve necessary improvements, governments will need to rely more heavily on the private health sector. Indeed, private providers already play a significant role in the health sector in Africa and are expected to continue to play a key role, and private providers serve all income levels across Sub-Saharan Africa’s health systems. The World Health Organization (WHO) and others have identified improvements in the way governments interact with and make use of their private health sectors as one of the key ingredients to health systems improvements.