Faith-based Healthcare in Africa: Stylized Facts from Data Collected by the Catholic Church

Abstract

While research on faith-based healthcare in Africa covers a rich array of topics, we still need to better understand some of the basic features of the sector, including its size. This editorial provides a brief discussion of the size of the faith-based healthcare sector globally and in Africa and some of its characteristics based on data on the number of facilities operated by the Catholic Church in Africa, the largest provider of faith-based healtcare globally and on the continent. Africa is the region of the world where the number of Catholic health facilities operated by the Church has increased the most in the last 40 years, but there is a lot of heterogeneity between countries in terms of the number of Catholic facilities in operation.