Health Microinsurance Schemes: Monitoring and Evaluation Guide (Volume 1: Methodology)

This guide aims to strengthen the capacity of managers to monitor and evaluate their health microinsurance schemes (HMIS), and the capacity of technical and financial support agencies and private insurers, to assess the viability and performance of HMIS. The guide is based on the contributions of field practitioners and international experts, and the collaboration of numerous actors involved in the development of health microinsurance schemes. The reasons for Strategies and Tools against social Exclusion and Poverty (STEP) to produce the guide were:

• The shortage of tools available to health microinsurance schemes (HMIS) managers for monitoring and evaluating the viability of HMIS;
• The need for scheme operators to share their experiences and to possess qualitative, comparable and readily available information;
• The lack of evaluation data concerning HMIS needed to assist states and cooperation agencies in defining their policies and operations in this sector.

The diverse range of HMIS that the guide covers have two common features:

• They are predicated on the notion of health insurance as a financial instrument;
• They are operated by an organization responsible for the insurance product.

The guide is divided into the following sections:

• Definitions, basic concepts, required capacities and key indicators;
• Monitoring tools and procedures;
• Evaluating the viability of the HMIS;
• Evaluating the institutional viability of the HMIS;
• Some indications for evaluating the efficiency, effectiveness and impact of the HMIS.