Vax Up
Vaccine Acceptance and
Uptake Programme
Illustrations by Icons8
Save the Children, Busara Center for Behavioral Economics and Common Thread are launching a new collaborative initiative to focus on COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and uptake in Africa and Asia.
Just as diagnostic tests do not prevent transmission without social distancing and prevention behaviors, successful vaccine deployment and uptake will rely on people accepting and seeking the vaccine.
Efforts to increase demand for the vaccine will ultimately fail if they do not consider and respond to human behavior and social context. Further, vaccine roll-out programmes that do not address behavioral issues in relation to COVID-19 vaccines risk fuelling vaccine hesitancy generally, which could seriously damage efforts to establish childhood vaccination coverage.
Save the Children, the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics and Common Thread have formed an innovative partnership to use behavioral insights to tackle this issue.
Using findings from psychology, anthropology, economics and sociology, behavioral insights identify and analyse why people behave in a certain way, and what can be done to influence the decisions they make.
These insights can inform and shape effective plans to support vaccine roll out, focusing specifically on driving demand and addressing mistrust, hesitancy and intention - action gaps.
This partnership brings together the expertise, resources and reach to provide effective strategic support to governments as they seek to develop successful vaccination roll out programmes.
We are working with countries in Africa and Asia, starting in Kenya, Nepal and Philippines. Read more about our approach here.
The COVID-19 pandemic won't be over until it is over for everyone, everywhere.
The Little Jab Book
While the COVID-19 vaccines have given the world hope that the pandemic’s end is in sight, we now face another challenge: ensuring enough people actually get vaccinated to quell the disease. The Little Jab Book provides 18 strategies – derived from the behavioral sciences – that can be applied to increase uptake throughout the vaccination process.
The Little Jab Book also includes a primer on important formative research to conduct, and barriers to consider, before adapting the strategies for the reader’s own context. Led by Save the Children’s Center for Utilizing Behavioral Insights for Children (CUBIC), the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics, and Common Thread, The Little Jab Book highlights case studies from previous vaccination programs around the world, and is based on interviews and insights from a dozen global behavioral science and health experts.
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The Little Jab Book: Kenya
Inspired by The Little Jab Book, this book begins with a look into the most important vaccine uptake problems in Kenya and highlights interventions to overcome these problems.
It features 9 recommended behavioural science interventions based on in-depth interviews with parents in Nairobi, Kiambu, and Bungoma and quantitative survey data from 1412 young people from the Nairobi area to effectively address social, cultural, and economic barriers and enablers to vaccination.
The Little Jab Book: Nepal
This book combines everything you loved about The Little Jab Book with research conducted in Nepal’s Province 2 to bring you a guide for implementing localised and co-designed solutions to overcome Nepal’s key challenges to COVID-19 vaccination.
This book explores the most important barriers to vaccine confidence in Nepal and offers 12 behavioural science recommendations specific to parents, youth, and health workers. All the design concepts featured in this book were developed and iterated on with feedback from parents and health workers in Province 2.
The Little Jab Book: Philippines
The Little Jab Book takes a trip to the Philippines! This playbook offers 12 behavioural science interventions to increase demand for COVID-19 vaccination in parents and children in both rural and urban Philippines.
The proposed interventions target key barriers and enablers to vaccination gathered from in-depth interviews with 29 parents and a survey of 627 people in living in Malabon and Sarangani.
Papua New Guinea: The Little Jab Book
COVID-19 has had significant economic and health impacts around the world. In Papua New Guinea (PNG), COVID-19 has led to 669 confirmed deaths and 46,663 cases from January 3, 2020 to January 25, 2023. To minimize the number of infections, the short and long-term negative health effects, and the number of deaths due to COVID-19, a global vaccination roll-out is imperative, making the vaccines the number one measure to combat this pandemic.
Inspired by the Little Jab book series, this book begins with a look into the most important vaccine uptake problems in PNG and highlights interventions to overcome these problems. It includes a total of 12 recommended behavioural science interventions for adults living in urban or rural PNG.
The Littlest Jab Book: Increasing COVID-19 vaccination among children and teens
While many people prefer to think that the COVID-19 pandemic is over, it continues to have detrimental effects on people’s health, communities, health systems, and economies, around the globe. We should also not forget that the relative return to normality in some countries is due to their high vaccination rates. Since our first Little Jab Book, there have been many advancements in vaccine development and governments around the world have started rolling out the COVID-19 vaccination for children – either 0-18, 5-18 or 12-18 years old.
Building on the success of ‘The Little Jab Book: 18 behavioral science strategies for increasing vaccination uptake’, this playbook looks into the most important COVID-19 vaccine uptake challenges for children in the Global South, based on international literature and formative research in Kenya, India, the Philippines, and Nepal, and highlights interventions to overcome these challenges. It includes a total of 10 recommended behavioural science interventions to increase COVID-19 vaccine rates among children.
The Little Jab Aid
Can a notebook help increase COVID-19 vaccination? These ones just might. Tucked within these notebooks are practical guides to help you get to the bottom of vaccine hesitancy and design tailored solutions to increase COVID-19 vaccination rates.
These tools were designed to eliminate the anxiety and embarrassment of using a job aid, while enabling users to more confidently design behavioral interventions for women and teachers in the Middle East and North Africa.
If you’re leading or implementing a public health or vaccination programme in MENA, or are working with women, teachers or administrators on other social issues, this tool can provide evidence-based ideas to encourage healthy behaviour in your context. This tool could be useful for anyone looking to build demand in the field, especially officials at the Ministry of Health or Ministry of Education, humanitarian or aid workers, administrators in the local government or non-governmental community organizations.
Contact us.
Allison Zelkowitz
Director, Center for Utilizing Behavioral Insights for Children (CUBIC)
at Save the Children Asia
allison.zelkowitz@savethechildren.org
Michael Coleman
Co-Founder and Co-Director, Common Thread
Chaning Jang
CEO and Director, Busara Center for Behavioral Economics