Assessing Vaccine Hesitancy in West Africa
BDI's latest research intervention is Assessing Vaccine Hesitancy in West Africa: A Survey Experiment in Ghana, or the Vaccine Hesitancy Research Project (VHRP). The VHRP is an intensive field survey investigating vaccine hesitancy in four regions, 12 districts, and 25 diverse communities across Ghana. VHRP has an underlying humanitarian component, as we advocate and offer administration of approved COVID-19 vaccines to willing community members through strong partnerships with local stakeholders while gathering data.
Our Project
BDI's Vaccine Hesitancy Research Project (VHRP) is designed to accelerate vaccination rates in Ghana and the sub-region, and better understand sources of vaccine hesitancy more broadly. Research efforts will be embedded in a national vaccine drive that targets rural communities, and thus all interviews will include a reduced-cost control effect that elicits unique data on respondent behaviour when the vaccine is immediately available.
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Our Approach
Vaccine hesitancy remains a critical challenge to achieving herd immunity from the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana and across most of West Africa and other predominant black and brown communities around the world. Existing research on the sources and implications of vaccine hesitancy is limited in method and scope. VHRP proposes a cross-sectional investigation that employs semi-structured interviews paired with quantitative survey data collection to identify reasons for vaccine hesitancy, sources of vaccine mis- and disinformation, and regional, gender, ethnic, religious, educational sources of variation amongst hesitancy and information sources. Interviews will include a dialogic intervention experiment that tests the effectiveness of different educational content across demographic groups.
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Partnerships
Additionally, the project will engage mosques, churches, chiefs, and community leaders in promoting vaccine trust. In partnership with these key stakeholders and the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) regional/district directorates and the Ghana Health Service District Health Directorates, our research efforts will be embedded in a national vaccine drive in which we administer vaccines to the public while collecting survey data on effective informational frames and sources of vaccine hesitancy.
