Caring by Example: Assessing South Korea's knowledge sharing initiative for universal health coverage in low and middle-income countries

Abstract

South Korea, once one of the poorest countries in the world, achieved universal health coverage (UHC) in 1989 in a record 12 years. Based on this success, the country now shares its expertise through its training course for policymakers in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs). This thesis analyzes the effectiveness of this knowledge-sharing initiative and argues that it falls short of being an effective capacity building program for stakeholders in LMICs to develop and implement UHC programs within their countries. A lack of emphasis on the economic and socio-political contextual factors that enabled South Korea’s successful UHC achievement limits opportunities for trainees to draw transferable and applicable lessons from South Korea’s experience to their own healthcare systems. An analysis such as this may be of particular interest to other emerging donor countries that offer aid programs for UHC in the form of shared expertise based on its own development experiences.