Illness Support and Community Based Health Insurance in Northern Senegal

The primary project objective is to explore the forms of social and economic support that Senegalese families of Linguere, Senegal relate to, negotiate and engage in the case of a serious health event or chronic disease, and to gain insight about how families perceive and experience Les Mutuelles. This will be pursued with respect to the following sub-objectives: (1) Explore illness experiences among families of the formal public sector and the informal sector (2) Explore health decision-making processes and family decisions in a changing epidemiological context of disease burden and intervention access (3) Explore treatment trajectories within families (4) Explore healthcare providers’ understandings of what informs patients’ care decisions and what prevalent forms of forms of economic support patients draw on in health seeking (5) Explore how families perceive, interact with and experience Les Mutuelles, and what Les Mutuelles enrollment entails and means to community members and families