Providing health care for women in an extreme context through micro-franchising: The case of West Africa, Central Africa and Southeast Asia

In lieu of an abstract, here a brief snippet from the introduction:
While commercial franchising has a long and successful history, microfranchising – which focuses on people with low purchasing power – is still in its early stages. Microfranchising is commonly considered to be a useful and simple method to initiate and progress a business model. It principally focuses on “the bottom of the pyramid”, the poorest tier of humanity who cannot afford traditional forms of franchising (Christensen et al., 2010) and helps them to establish their own businesses rapidly “through the creation and provision of sound, proven businesses that will in turn increase the earning potential of the microfranchisee” (Fairbourne, 2007, p.2). In addition, microfranchising is also considered a tool for alleviating grand social challenges (Fairbourne, 2007; Christensen et al., 2010; Kistruck et al., 2011); e.g. by offering entrepreneurs “a standardised business model with access to a supply chain, marketing, financing, training and ongoing management” (Sireau, 2011, p.2). Microfranchising has increasingly been explored in Southeast Asia, Western and Central Africa to overcome several challenges in health care. Of particular interest for this project are microfranchising approaches that aspire to create health access for woman in rural, mountainous, and remote areas. This bears significance since women and girls in these areas are still denied access to quality health services because of sociocultural and economic factors.