Case Study
Microcare Ltd. Health Plan (Uganda) Notes from a visit 17-21 June 2002
Microinsurance technical advise to MFIs providing microinsurance
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14 pages
This paper describes the evolution of ‘MicroCare’, a not-for-profit health management organization in Uganda that focuses entirely on the low-income market, from working primarily with microfinance institutions (MFIs) to working with other low-income groups in order to identify issues related to working with MFIs in partnerships.
The paper describes MicroCare’s:
- Products, institutional structure, and partnerships;
- Management and governance;
- Client levels of satisfaction with the product;
- Risk management and SWOT analysis.
The paper concludes by deriving lessons from the experience of MicroCare about:
- Operations:
- A good computer system needs to be in place to prevent hospital patients from cheating the system,
- A health care financing institution must develop and maintain reserves and relationships with a re-insurer to take care of risk.
- Marketing:
- Marketers are the growth engine of a health insurance operation,
- Unless there is effective supervision of a marketer’s activities, the institution is unlikely to realize meaningful growth,
- Marketing needs to create awareness in people about insurance.
- Accounts:
- A health insurance operation needs to have an efficient accounts department that can interpret information and make it useful to the management.
- Partners:
- There is a need to have clear criteria for the selection of partners and agreements that adequately bind partners to their roles.
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