Is it all about money? A randomized evaluation of the impact of insurance literacy and marketing treatments on the demand for health microinsurance in Senegal

Michel Tenikue, CEPS/INSTEAD
Jacopo Bonan, Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca
Olivier Dagnelie, Independent Consultant
Philippe LeMay-Boucher, Heriot-Watt University

In Senegal, mutual health organizations (MHOs) address health care challenges, faced in particular by the poor, by covering a fraction of their health care costs when needed. Despite their benefits, in some areas, there remain low take-up rates. This paper studies the determinants of health microinsurance uptake with a particular emphasis on the use of MHOs’ services. We offer a customized insurance literacy module, communicating the needs and benefits from personal health microinsurance and the functioning of MHOs, to a randomly selected sample of households in the city of Thiès. The effects of this training and the effect of three cross-cutting marketing treatments are evaluated using a randomized control trial. We find that the insurance literacy module has no impact on the take up of health microinsurance from MHOs’, but that our marketing treatment has a large significant effect on the take up decisions of households.