Cash for COVID-19 vaccines in Africa: A financial incentives trial in rural Ghana

This seminar is jointly hosted by the Tax and Transfer Policy Institute (TTPI), Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU and the Department of Health Services Research and Policy (DHSRP), College of Health and Medicine, ANU.

In this seminar we discuss how we implemented a clustered randomized controlled trial with 8,854 residents in six rural Ghana Districts to determine whether financial incentives produce substantial increases in COVID-19 vaccine uptake. Villages were randomly assigned to receive one of four video treatment arms: a placebo, a standard health message, a high cash incentive ($10) and a low cash incentive ($3). Non-vaccinated subjects, assigned to the Cash incentive treatments had an average COVID-19 vaccine intention rate of 81% compared to the 71% for those in the Placebo treatment arm. Two months after the initial intervention the average self-reported vaccination rates for subjects in the Cash treatment were about 3.6% higher than those for subjects in the Placebo treatment 40% versus 36.5%. The verified vaccination rates of subjects in the Cash treatment arms exhibited more modest treatment effects: 70.3% of verified subjects had at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine compared to the 67.3% for those in Placebo. The low cash incentive ($3.00) had a larger positive effect on COVID-19 vaccine uptake than the high cash incentive ($10.00). There is no evidence of spillover effects of the financial incentives to subjects in non-financial treatment arms nor to non-treated proximate residents.

Raymond Duch is the co-founder and Director of the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) at Nuffield College University of Oxford. He established and directed similar CESS centers in Chile, China, and India. He is also co-Director of the Candour Project that assembles a global team of research scholars with expertise in behavioral economics and data analytics addressing challenging health policy issues. His research focuses on the application of experimental methods to understanding individual decision making related to politics, finance, health, and economics. His publications have appeared in leading social science journals including, American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, Applied Economics, Journal of Politics, and Nature Medicine. Ray Duch has held visiting appointments at IAST-Toulouse School of Economics, Stanford Graduate School of Business, WZB-Berlin, Université de Montréal, and Pompeo- Fabra University , Barcelona. His research is funded by leading social science funding agencies including the NSF, ESRC, FONDECYT, and SSHRC. He frequently advises governments, international organizations, law firms and corporations.