Rural Households’ Willingness to Pay for Improved Healthcare Services in Oyo State, Nigeria: A Choice Experiment Approach

Abstract

Limited health budget is a major challenge confronting provision of improved health care services in  Nigeria and some other developing countries. This requires alternative innovative ways of raising fund to  provide health care services in rural communities.. In this regard a user fee approach is proposed for Ido  local government area of Oyo state, Nigeria. Multistage sampling technique was adopted to select 150  rural households from where one person per household was selected to constitute 150 respondents for  the study. Data were collected through administration of structured questionnaire. This work further  employed attribute-based choice valuation technique using six improved health care attributes; price,  ambulance, medical doctor, night duty, drug and ownership. Result from the analysis using conditional  logit revealed that individual members of the community were willing to pay for improved health care  services per consultation. The mean Willingness to Pay (WTP) was estimated at N808.86. The paper  suggests that adoption of users’ fee is a good policy option for primary healthcare service in the rural communities