A dissertation submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of
Master of Business Administration (MBA) of Mzumbe University, June 2018.
The World call for Universal Health Coverage as a means to ensure access to quality
health to all regardless of our financial position. Health insurance is one of many ways
towards attaining that goal, in Tanzania about 30% of the population is covered by one
form of health insurance majority being in the formal sector. Efforts are there to
improve engagement of the informal sector in the process.
The main objective of the study was to assess factors that influence the decision of
workers from the informal sector to join the available health insurance schemes in
Tanzania.
This was a descriptive cross-sectional study that employed a multistage cluster
sampling method to collect data from 6 wards of Ilala Municipal council. The sample
size was 322, two trained data collectors were used to collect data for two weeks and
the information was entered into an SPSS computer system version 20 for analysis.
All respondents from this study were male with the mean age of 29.8 years, majority
(62.4%) had primary education and 48.2% were single. About 32% of respondents
were aware of NHIF and the main source of information was Radio (31.4%). Only
12.2% of the respondents were members of one of the health insurance schemes, about
40% were aware of the benefits of health insurance and related concepts. Lack of
awareness of the insurance schemes and their operations, poor quality of services in
public facilities, inability to afford the premiums were the most pronounced factors
that hinders people from joining health insurance schemes. Increased awareness of the
insurance schemes, lowering of premiums, improved quality of health services were
among factors that will influence them to join health insurance schemes.
From the findings, it can be concluded that, awareness of both the availability of these
schemes and their operations was the most influencing factor followed by quality of
health services, if these two factors are taken into consideration, they can either hinder
or influence the enrolment.