An extra dollar can go a long way

doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7475.1126

BMJ 2004;329:1126 (13 November), doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7475.1126

News

Learning from low income countries

An extra dollar can go a long way

Geoff Watts

London

Small amounts of money can have a powerful effect when properlytargeted, a health project in Tanzania has shown

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

With a gross domestic product of little more than $200 (£110; ${euro}$ 155) per person, Tanzania is among the world's poorest countries.Spending on health care for each citizen amounts to around $10a year. Any increase in such a small sum must be better thannothing; but who could have imagined that less than one extradollar would bring significant improvement?

Surprising or not, that's what the organisers of an innovativehealth scheme have shown. The effect of that extra dollar intwo districts of Tanzania has been a substantial fall in infantmortality and an improvement in the health of adults. Such arethe fruits of the Tanzanian Essential Health Intervention project(TEHIP), the first full account of which, Fixing Health Systems,was published last month.

Inspired by a 1993 World Bank report on the effectiveness ofhealth interventions and funded by Canada's International DevelopmentResearch Centre, the . . . [Full text of this article]

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