Resource Type: Brief
Authors: Health Finance and Governance Project
Published: 01/2014

Resource Description:

Performance-based incentive (PBI) programs are burgeoning all over the world, and can be leveraged to strengthen social accountability and overcome key challenges associated with civil society monitoring of health care providers. Community-based monitoring interventions rest fundamentally on the presumption that information about health services is gathered, made available to the community, and used to hold providers accountable. But collecting reliable information is costly and typically abandoned once donor funded projects end. In PBI programs that offer performance incentives to health care providers, collecting and verifying data about provider performance—both the quantity and quality of services they deliver—is a routine activity that can be performed by communities and used by citizens to monitor or grade provider performance. This brief describes these two key mechanisms by which PBI can strengthen social accountability and sketches a pathway for implementation.