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Over the last decade in Rwanda, deaths from HIV, TB, and malaria dropped by 80 percent, maternal mortality dropped by 60 percent, life expectancy doubled -- all at an average health care cost of $55 per person per year.

Amidst the barrage of stories about failing states and civil wars that characterize the dour American media coverage of the developing world, the reinvention of Rwanda offers hope. Since the genocide with which its name is still synonymous in the United States, Rwanda has doubled its life expectancy and now offers a replicable model for delivery of high quality health care with limited resources.

Dr. Paul Farmer, Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Partners In Health, says that, "Rwanda has shown on a national level that you can break the cycle of poverty and disease."

Rwanda retains 92 percent of patients in HIV care -- compared to 50 percent in the U.S.

In the wake of the genocide that killed nearly one million people in 1994, such a turnaround seemed nearly impossible. Rwanda was a failed state mired in poverty and chaos. The genocide decimated Rwanda's health facilities and workforce, allowing infectious diseases to run rampant and more than one in four children to die before their fifth birthday. Normally in such situations, economic development stagnates because disease cripples workers and the national economy, leaving the country too poor to effectively reduce the burden of disease. With a life expectancy of only 30 the year after the genocide, Rwanda looked poised to follow this pattern.

Over the last ten years, Rwanda's health system development has led to the most dramatic improvements of health in history. Rwanda is the only country in sub-Saharan Africa on track to meet most of the Millennium Development Goals. Deaths from HIV, TB, and malaria have each dropped by roughly 80 percent over the last decade and the maternal mortality ratio dropped by 60 percent over the same period. Even as the population has increased by 35 percent since 2000, the number of annual child deaths has fallen by 63 percent. In turn, these advances bolstered Rwanda's economic growth: GDP per person tripled to $580, and millions lifted themselves from poverty over the last decade.

The rest of the world, wealthy countries and well as poor, can learn from Rwanda's rapid rise. Too often, though, experts imply that Rwanda's results are inseparable from the genocide. 

In this explanation, the genocide created a "clean slate" on which Rwanda could build a new health system thanks to an influx of health aid from wealthy countries feeling guilty about what happened. However, in the years immediately following the genocide, Rwanda received the least health aid of anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa, as many organizations wrote the country off as a lost cause. Even today, Rwanda achieves its superb improvement while spending only $55 per person on health care and public health per year -- 22nd among the 49 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

Cameron Nutt/Adapted from "Reduced premature mortality in Rwanda: lessons from success." [BMJ]

Rwanda achieves exceptional results not from how much money they spend on health, but from how they spend it. A recent article in BMJ, led by Farmer, examined World Health Organization data and sought to identify why Rwanda developed so rapidly, and to clarify the lessons for other countries. Rather than a single cause, the authors identified a series of interconnected factors that contributed to the country's turnaround.

First and foremost, credit belongs to the government of Rwanda's centralized planning. In 2000, the Rwandan government created a plan, called Vision 2020, to develop economically into a middle-income country over the next two decades. Dr. Agnes Binagwaho, Rwanda's Minister of Health, explained that "health is a key pillar of our development" and that without improving health, they will never alleviate the country's poverty. 

The government has stressed coordination between sectors and requires all government ministries to create plans to deal with certain cross-cutting issues such as HIV and, as of 2011, non-communicable diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular disease, too. In the case of foreign aid, the government has taken leadership on aid allocation to fit within Vision 2020. If funding organizations or NGOs want to work in Rwanda, they must fit within that plan and meet transparency and accountability standards, or they will be asked to leave.

As the Global Fund, PEPFAR, and other organizations made unprecedented health aid available for disease-specific programs targeting HIV in the early 2000s, Rwanda has used this money to build a robust system of primary care. According to Dr. Binagwaho, Rwanda decided to use this money to build health systems because HIV does not exist in a vacuum -- if an HIV program does not address the associated problems such as tuberculosis and malnutrition, it will fail. 

The uptake of HIV testing in sub-Saharan Africa is influenced by the quality and manner in which health services are delivered, according to a review of 42 qualitative studies, published this month in BMC Public Health. Perceived problems with confidentiality, staff attitudes and long waiting times discouraged many people from testing, whereas trusted and more convenient facilities – and local availability of antiretroviral therapy – encouraged individuals to take an HIV test.

Moreover, the “availability and convenience of provider-initiated HIV testing provides that extra ‘push’ that enables individuals to overcome barriers,” the authors write. They call for stepping up provider-initiated HIV testing, especially when individuals are being screened for other, less stigmatising, conditions.

Their review also sheds light on numerous individual and relationship factors that encourage or discourage people from taking an HIV test.

On average, only four-in-ten African people living with HIV have been diagnosed. A number of quantitative and qualitative studies have looked into the reasons why, but systematic reviews are lacking.

Maurice Musheke and colleagues used an approach known as ‘meta-ethnography’ to synthesise the results of 42 different qualitative studies conducted in 13 African countries, published between 2001 and 2012. The researchers were looking specifically for research on the factors influencing access to and uptake of HIV testing.