Grameen Micro-Credit to Grameen Kalyan Health Program for the Poor: Reasons for Optimism

The 1978 International Conference on Primary Health Care at Alma Ata at Kazaktan set the goal of "Health for all by the year 2000". Since then more than nearly three decades have elapsed. But the task that Alma Ata Conference had identified has remained, alas, largely unaccomplished. This does not mean that some progress has not been made in primary health care in Bangladesh, but that the ending of rampant diseases, untimely deaths, and preventable disabilities has been quite limited, particularly among the poor. Thus, despite numerous past attempts in rural Bangladesh to deliver an integrated package of health services to all, no effective and sustainable institutional framework that can effectively do so has yet been established. The Grameen Kalyan Health Program of the Grameen Family of Institutions is an exception in this regard. It has initiated a package of rural health services for the rural poor, which is delivering not only effective, efficient and sustainable services, but is also potentially capable of achieving scale. From Grameen Micro-Credit Program to Grameen Kalyan Health Program contains comprehensive information about the Grameen Kalyan Health Program in rural Bangladesh, including its management principles and practices, community-based clinical and outreach services in basic health care, family planning, reproductive health, and a Health Insurance Scheme for the rural poor. This book also describes the local level mobilization strategies of the Grameen Kalyan Health Program, which are based on those of its sister program of Grameen Micro-Credit, and shows how these strategies are enabling the Grameen Health Program to deliver not only effective, efficient, equitable and quality health services to all, but also has the potentiality of achieving scale with sustainability. Based on this review, the author of this book enlists the reasons for optimism that "Health for All" will be achieved very rapidly in Bangladesh with lessons for the rest of the developing countries.