African Traditional Healers: Incentives and Skill in Health Care Delivery

African Traditional Healers and Outcome-Contingent Contracts in Health Care*

Traditional healers are a source of health care for which Africans have always paid and even with the expansion of modern medicine healers are still popular. This paper advances the unique view that traditional healers neither possess supernatural power nor do they take advantage of their clients: they use important elements of their practice to credibly deliver unobservable medical effort and ...

Outcome versus service based payments in health care: lessons from African traditional healers.

We compare the more common physician compensation method of fee-for-service to the less common payment-for-outcomes method. This paper combines an investigation of the theoretical properties of both of these payment regimes with a unique data set from rural Cameroon in which patients can choose between outcome and service based payments. We show that consideration of the role of patient effort ...

Traditional healers for mental health care in Africa

G lobal mental health is primarily concerned with reducing inequalities in the access to health care and health outcomes for people with mental illness within and between countries (1). Reducing the vast treatment gap and promoting the rights of people with mental illness to live with dignity are major goals of adherents of the field such as the Movement for Global Mental Health (www.globalment...

The future of the traditional African healers

Leprosy care through traditional healers.

A n encouraging increase i n the knowledge of leprosy has been found in traditional healers after training has been given . Evaluation was by preand post-training questionnaires to which scores were assigned. Their role in leprosy care at the community level i s also being discussed . The traditional healer is part and parcel of the social milieu where he commands respect and has an intimate re...