Case study: Malawi

Overview

All essential health care services in Malawi’s public sector are in theory free at the point of delivery; however, the services offered are severely limited by the lack of available resources, with facilities making services available in an ad hoc manner. Efforts to prioritize, although supported at the policy level, have been hampered by the health system’s lack of capacity to deliver even prioritized services, and by resource limitations at all levels of implementation, insufficient communication of policies to health workers, and duplicative parallel systems due to reliance on development partner funding.