Market development approaches to promoting public health products and services created by Scott Merrill

The private sector plays an important and often predominant role in providing healthcare products and services in many developing countries. As such, there is a strong rationale and growing interest in public health development programmes to promote the private sector as a constructive partner to deliver healthcare products and services, and for development organizations to increasingly look to the private sector as a vehicle for delivering essential services to hard-to-reach underserved populations in a sustainable manner. The purpose of this paper is to share key lessons learned for designing and implementing sustainable public health development projects utilizing a market development approach by: i) exploring the rationale for promoting the private health sector; ii) outlining lessons learned and key principles for designing and implementing programmes that work with commercial private healthcare actors; and iii) outlining opportunities for promoting commercial sustainability of healthcare products and se