IMPROVING HEALTH: HOW THE CAPABILITY APPROACH HELPS IN TWO WEST AFRICAN CASE STUDIES. Allan G. Hill, Nedialka Douptcheva, Mathias Lerch and Claudine Sauvain-Dugerdil. Abstract West Africa stands out as the region with some of the worst health and mortality indices as well as scoring poorly on other measures such as the Human Development Index. There are nonetheless sharp differentials in health and well-being by urban/rural residence, educated or not, young and old. That is, some inequalities are structural in origin. There are however, inequalities which have a more local origin, depending on household and family level factors that affect, for example, access to health services and the effective use of opportunities for income generation and improvements in well-being. After a discussion of some concepts underlying the description of individual and population health states, we use two case studies based on several years of West African field work – women’s health in Accra and the welfare of young people in Bamako – to illustrate how adoption of the capability framework can encourage development policies and projects to address some of the household and family level factors in addition to dealing with the structural barriers to the improvement of human capabilities. In the examples we address both practical and conceptual issues in dealing with the links between health and development using the capability lens. Key words Health, mortality, women’s health, young people’s health, health capabilities and functionings, West Africa, Ghana, Mali.