WIEGO Social Protection Case Study: The Ghana National Health Insurance Scheme

DRAFT Document. Ghana’s National Health Insurance Scheme is an innovative attempt to extend social protection to informal workers and, as such, it may hold important policy lessons for other countries where the informal economy is large and growing and where informal workers are excluded from existing social protection mechanisms. Despite this fact, few studies have specifically focused on the impact of the NHIS on informal workers. This WIEGO Social Protection case study is an attempt to fill this gap in the literature.

The case study concentrates on female informal workers in particular and has three major objectives: to describe the background, structure, implementation and context of the NHIS in Ghana, to assess the barriers faced by female informal workers in terms of accessing the Scheme, and to determine how much voice these workers have had in the development of the Scheme.