Assessing the impact of fee exemption on maternal health in West Africa and Morocco: new tools, new knowledge

There is a growing consensus that maternal health outcomes can only be improved through policies and programmes that combine interventions to address the different causes of ill health and target multiple groups. Such policies and programmes are complex in nature as they involve coordination between different tiers in the health system and multiple actors including communities, health workers and managers. User fee exemption for delivery and emergency obstetric care (EmOC) is one such policy that has been introduced by several African countries with the aim of improving access to care and thus improving maternal and neonatal outcomes.
However, the current evidence base regarding the impact of this policy is not well developed, in part because of evaluation designs that are not able to capture all the necessary information for policy-makers to make informed decisions. This proposal aims to reduce this gap by developing research methodologies and tools that will lead to enhanced research on policy implementation, stronger evidence and improved dissemination.