Olutimayin Jide
The University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji.
Pac Health Dialog. 2002 Sep;9(2):237-41.
Most governments in developing countries have adopted frameworks for health development which stressed community based initiatives and intervention at all levels of the health pyramid (WHO, 1992). But even today, most of the rural communities in these countries are still not developed in terms of available health facilities. What then is/are responsible for these failures? Various authors have come up with various reasons, principal amongst which are inadequate resources, lack of planning, insincerity/non-commitment of the governments, lack of modern information technology, etc. This paper examines some of these factors in relation to how they accentuate or hamper healthcare delivery in developing countries, using African rural communities as a study field. The resultant suggestions are a consortium of varying factors, some of which are economic in nature, policy changes, human resources development, and re-orientation of social and government attitudes towards achieving meaningful results in healthcare delivery, particularly in the rural communities.
