Timely Vaccination Reminders
Behavioral science and its famed “nudges” are powerful tools that can impact human decisions and attitudes. The good news about this trend is that it also applies to early childhood development. This project seeks to modify caregivers’ behavior by way of text messages that help boost vaccination rates in developing countries. It is an innovative program because it leverages existent information gathered from administrative lists of children who are up for preventive care services. It also provides new evidence on cost-effectiveness, as it conducts a careful evaluation to determine if a given intervention modifies family behavior using low-cost technologies such as text messages.
Problematic
Throughout the world, only 67% of children under 5 years of age get all the vaccines recommended for their age. In Guatemala, families living in rural areas acknowledge the importance of vaccination, but as children grow, the focus on timely shots loses momentum. In other words, while mothers, fathers and caregivers are aware of the importance of vaccines, they need help and timely information for this important health component to stay strong.
Solution
Bearing in mind that it’s about specific vaccines for specific ages, the program instructs health staff to send messages to the families using the lists of children who were due to visit a healthcare center the following month to get their vaccines. Given the multiple chores that mothers and fathers must tackle, a nudge in time costs little and can have an important impact.
Evaluation and Impact
A total 130 clinics were randomly allocated to either a treatment or a control group. In both groups, the health staff provided families with information on visits to vaccination centers. But the treatment group personnel were given updated information, while the control group staff had to use their own rosters, which might or might not have been already created. Six months after the intervention, the timely vaccination rates of children from the two groups were compared. Given the fact that not all the staff assigned to the treatment were provided with lists, the local effect on the probability of all children completing the vaccination timetable has been estimated at 4.5 percentage points. The good news is that strong positive impacts were detected. In addition, the good cost-benefit ratio makes it an option also suitable for scalability purposes.