Vaccine Access Initiative Supported by Weiss Asset Management Foundation Continues to Expand

With funding from Weiss Asset Management Foundation, economists Mushfiq Mobarak, Niccolò Meriggi, and Maarten Voors led a groundbreaking public health experiment in 2022 focused on increasing access to COVID-19 vaccines in remote communities in Sierra Leone. The team has now received an additional $673,000 grant, provided by the Social Science Research Council, to expand its vaccine delivery research. 

In the 2022 study, Prof. Mobarak’s team piloted ways to reduce obstacles to vaccination in 150 rural villages outside Sierra Leone’s national health clinic network. The results were striking: Vaccination rates in the villages increased from 9.5% to 30.2%, and individuals from neighboring communities also came to receive the vaccine, doubling the total number of people vaccinated at a cost of just $33 per person.

The team’s intervention strategy addressed the challenge of vaccine accessibility in rural areas, where most of Sierra Leone’s population resides. While recent research on vaccine delivery has focused on individual behavioral concerns like vaccine hesitancy, supply-side challenges such as basic vaccine accessibility pose a more fundamental barrier to increased vaccination rates. “At the time vaccines became available, it would take the average Sierra Leonean three and half hours each way to go to the nearest vaccination center, at a cost of about 10 days’ worth of wages,” Prof. Mobarak noted.  

The Sierra Leone Ministry of Health subsequently implemented strategies from the study, deploying 1,400 vaccination squads across the country with the goal of vaccinating 70% of the population by year-end 2022. As of March 2024, more than 9.1 million COVID doses had been administered in Sierra Leone—more than 1 per person—a dramatic difference from the 8% vaccination rate in the county when the study began. The results of the study were published in Nature and have received recognition from UNICEF.

“We are thrilled to support such a pivotal project, which generated both groundbreaking research and a direct impact on public health efforts,” said Harlan Downs-Tepper, Program Director of Weiss Asset Management Foundation. “Prof. Mobarak and his team’s efforts have made exceptional contributions to vaccine accessibility, and we are excited by the tremendous potential as their work progresses.” 

Building on the study’s findings, including that transportation of vaccines to rural communities poses the most significant financial cost, the Ministry of Health has also started combining COVID vaccinations with the delivery of additional immunizations for children – a priority campaign for the Ministry – to reduce the total cost of administering these vaccines. The Social Science Research Council’s grant will aid in scaling up the results from the initial study by bundling multiple maternal and child health interventions and delivering them to remote areas. 

“By experimenting with efforts to minimize the cost per person treated, we hope to unlock larger scale development funds to address these problems at national or regional scales,” said Prof. Mobarak about the expanded initiative, “Our study serves as a proof-of-concept that it is possible to cost-effectively vaccinate residents of the most remote places. Expanding the initiative’s vaccine delivery structure to communities across the Global South will be a significant step for achieving vaccine equity, not just for COVID, but for other diseases as well.” 

About the Research Team

Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak is the Jerome Kasoff ’54 Professor of Management and Economics at Yale University with concurrent appointments in the School of Management and in the Department of Economics. Mobarak is the founder and faculty director of the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE). 

Niccolò Meriggi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University. His research sits at the intersection of academia, policymaking and practice.

Maarten Voors is an Associate Professor at the Development Economics Group (DEC) at Wageningen University. He received his PhD from Wageningen University in 2011 (with honors) and was an Isaac Newton Trust Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge 2011-2013.

About Weiss Asset Management Foundation

Weiss Asset Management Foundation seeks to alleviate suffering globally. The Foundation’s recent substantial grants include support for groundbreaking research on expanding access to vaccines in rural communities in Africa, oxygen concentrators to rural communities in India, and community health workers in rural Nepal. For more information about Weiss Asset Management Foundation, visit www.wamfoundation.org.