Hasna Ashraf

In this paper, we aim to identify the challenges and opportunities in financing regenerative agriculture within the context of smallholder farming in India and offer suggestions for enhancing the financing of regenerative agriculture in the country.

In this note, we present a citizen-centric framework to study the factors that limit the effectiveness of state-sponsored health insurance schemes.

In the first blog in our trust series, we laid down the contours of trust. In this blog, we attempt to unpack what the proximate grounds for trusting Digital Financial Services or DFS may be.  Trust is the most cited motivator for the adoption of digital financial services or DFS (Kajol et al., 2022). Lack […]

This blog is the first in our trust series where we study trust in digital financial services. This blog attempts to lay down the conceptual contours of trust.

Managed competition is a theoretical concept for designing and regulating health insurance systems. Such systems can secure consumers' interests by managing diverging incentives, instituting uniform regulations, equipping consumers to make informed choices, and creating a competitive environment tailored to rewarding those organisations that improve services to consumers.

Financing of health systems is an enduring concern world wide. Yazbeck and colleagues in their paper make an important point that when there is a choice between financing in which contributions from citizens take place in the form of generalised taxes versus those in which they are in the form of insurance premiums, the overwhelming evidence suggests that tax-based financing is unambiguously superior even in low- and middle-income countries. Despite the strength of their case against contributory insurance, we suggest that the path forward may be more complex than they envisage for a number of reasons.

In this paper, we look at what made a transition to managed competition possible in the Netherlands, how managed competition has played out, and the challenges that the system currently faces.

The study is authored by Aarushi Gupta, senior research associate at Dvara Research. Bindu Ananth, co-founder and chair of Dvara Trust. Bindu Ananth and Hasna Ashraf are fellow, Lancet Citizen’s Commission on Reimagining India’s Health Systems.

Health systems are extremely complex, with multiple interacting components which can lead to varied outcomes depending on the context in which they are placed. Building a systematic understanding is then essential for designing health systems and reforming existing ones.

Based on a study of the theoretical and empirical literature, we conclude with a set of hypotheses that looks at how demand for health insurance can be fostered by targeting both the components of demand (intention and action), through well-designed awareness measures and nudges to overcome the various behavioural biases involved.