Universal Health Coverage in Burkina Faso: analyzing the role of knowledge and dynamics affecting this role in national policy-making

Health financing is an area often marked by explicit or implicit competition between different policies supported by various policy champions. This is the case in Burkina Faso, with a user fee removal, a performance-based financing and a universal health insurance adopted as part of the country’s efforts to advance Universal Health Coverage. We assume that knowledge (whether scientific or not) is key to influence policies’ choices, formulation and implementation in such a situation. Our research will try to understand how policy actors make use of different knowledge types in their ‘policy entrepreneurship’ action. We will also investigate why and how such knowledge use is affected by factors such as actors’ characteristics (their interests, preferences, beliefs and power), context, institutions and politics. We will use a multiple case study design and analyses will be performed using an extension of Kingdon’s multiple-streams approach. The originality of our research is to conceptualize knowledge broadly – and not just focusing on scientific evidence – as what constitutes valid knowledge in policy is actually debatable. Furthermore, understanding what, why and how knowledge is used/not used in health policy-making in Burkina Faso is very relevant as the country recently established, within the Ministry of Health, a Unit in charge of knowledge management and translation