**16. Conclusion**

Health is an asset. The conditions in which we are born, grow, live and work affect our health. Countries do not necessarily need wealth to gain health e.g. Sri Lanka had a maternal mortality rate of 2% in the 1930s not comparable to any country today [34]. Sri Lanka reduced maternal mortality to 0.6% today, spending less each year as they learnt what worked and did not work [34]. Similarly, countries in SSA could adapt their approach through first identification of health as asset and then investing in preventive and promotive health while still ensuring efficacy and efficiency of curative services. Addressing the different forms of poverty, utilising a systems thinking lens, could contribute to healthier societies.

**13**

**Author details**

Janet Michel1,2\* and Marcel Tanner2,3

Institute (Swiss TPH), Basel, Switzerland

3 University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland

provided the original work is properly cited.

1 Insel University Hospital, University of Bern, Switzerland

\*Address all correspondence to: janetmichel71@gmail.com

2 Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Swiss Tropical and Public Health

© 2021 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

*Poverty Is Not Poverty: The Reality on the Ground Including the Rural-Urban Divide…*

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.95901*

*Poverty Is Not Poverty: The Reality on the Ground Including the Rural-Urban Divide… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.95901*
