Social capital and health micro-insurance uptake by the informal sector workers in Kenya

Abstract

This paper focuses on social capital as a determinant of health micro insurance uptake by informalsector workers in eight regions (Lake, North Rift, Central, Pwani, South Eastern, Frontier counties,Narok-Kajiado and Nairobi) in Kenya. Further moderating effects of mobile telephone technology wasexplored to find out its influence on the health micro insurance uptake. The study target populationcomprised 7,399,347 micro and small enterprises while sample size of 1,387 was selected out of thepopulation using stratified sampling technique. Social capital was found positive and significant (pvalue<0.05) in relation to health micro insurance uptake. The mobile telephone technology was found positiveand significant (p-value< 0.05) in seven regions while Nairobi region, it was found to benegative and insignificant (p- value=0.123). The study found that social capital is an important factorto consider when selling micro insurance products.