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Towards the operationalisation of the Universal Health Insurance Scheme in Burkina Faso: the Council of Ministers adopts decreets establishing the scheme

Workshop to validate the application texts of the law on the RAMU, Ouagadougou, 16 July 2023.

On 09 August 2023, the Burkina Faso Council of Ministers adopted five decrees implementing Act No. 060 - 2015/CNT of 05 September 2015 on the Universal Health Insurance Scheme in Burkina Faso (RAMU). The decrees concern namely:

• the conditions and procedures for administrative control as part of the RAMU;
• the terms and conditions of registration of RAMU members, their dependants and poor families;
• the approval of standard models for national or individual agreements between RAMU management bodies and healthcare management bodies;
• the specification of the conditions and procedures for the medical control and expertise of health care benefits, goods and services guaranteed by the RAMU;
• the definition of the RAMU's essential basket of care.

The adoption of these decrees provides the Government with the legal instruments it needs to make the RAMU operational from July 2023, with the first target being 15 per cent of the population (3,300,000 workers), including those in the informal economy, covered by 2025. 

Long before they were adopted by the Council of Ministers, these texts underwent a long process of updating, finalisation, and validation, which began in 2021 and which counted on ILO technical assistance through the project "Building robust national social protection systems to cover workers in the informal economy and their families, facilitate their access to health care and enable them to face the challenges of tomorrow", financed by the Kingdom of Belgium. In Burkina Faso, the project provided support for the start-up of the RAMU and the extension of social health protection coverage to workers in the informal economy and rural areas. 

The texts were first drawn up and updated by a group of national stakeholders made up of the structures responsible for implementing the scheme in October 2021. They were then submitted for assessment to the social partners and to experts from the ILO's Social Protection Department, whose support ensured that the decrees allowed for the effective implementation of the RAMU and complied with the ILO’s international standards on social protection.

Workshop to draw up and update texts on the RAMU/BF, Koudougou, from 25 to 29 October 2021.

Finally, and after taking into account the amendments made by the social partners and ILO experts, the texts were validated by all the key stakeholders in the implementation of the RAMU, in particular the social partners, on 16 July 2023.  Following this approval, all the texts were forwarded to the Government and adopted by the Council of Ministers.

The approval of phase 2 of the project under the "Building social protection foundations for all. ILO Global Flagship Programme in Burkina Faso", financed by the Kingdom of Belgium and Luxembourg, ensures the continuity of the ILO's technical assistance to Burkina Faso in pursuing the adoption of complementary texts, in particular the decree on the contribution rate, the financing of the scheme, the decrees implementing the decree on the essential basket of care and all the steps required to ensure equitable access to quality health care for the entire population, in particular workers in the informal economy. This will be built on the basis of a national consensus on the technical parameters and for the operationalisation of the RAMU and in compliance with the ILO's international standards on social protection. 

Watch the video where the Minister for the Civil Service, Labour and Social Protection presents the decrees (In French).