Jamii Bora noticed that microfinance borrowers often default after a family member falls ill, and hence thought to offer micro insurance health plans…

Some 14 million Africans use micro-insurance, and the number of African policy holders has increased by 80 percent in the last five years, according to a recent study by the International Labor Organization. The numbers are still a fraction of the potential market but are growing rapidly as more organizations offer insurance products to the poor…

…About half of Kenya’s 40 million people survive on less than $2 a day. When children get sick from the raw sewage that trickles through fetid slums, families must choose between medicine or food. A hospital stay is usually out of the question. Hospitals sometimes detain patients, including new mothers, when they can’t pay their bills…

“Sometimes we see them conducting deliveries in the house and there are complications. Both the mother and the fetus can lose their life,” he said. Other patients, he said, “only go to hospitals when they are gasping or in a coma.”

Those are the tragedies that the continent’s insurance schemes are trying to avoid. Ghana’s government-run health insurance — introduced in 2003 — now covers about half the population. About 90 percent of Rwandans also have access to basic health care thanks to a government-run plan…

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