Vaccines are the most powerful and cost-effective means of protecting infants from several life-threatening diseases, including measles. According to the World Health Organization, measles vaccination programs resulted in an 80 percent drop in measles deaths between 2000 and 2017 across the globe. But measles is still a killer and was responsible for 110,000 deaths, mostly among children under the age of five, in 2017.
For measles vaccination programs to be effective, babies need to receive their doses on a regular schedule, a difficult-to-impossible task due to many issues — including a lack of transportation to clinics.
Assistant Professor Nicole Basta together with colleagues from the UMN School of Engineering and Makerere University in Uganda is piloting a novel intervention in Uganda that may give low-income residents of Kampala an inexpensive, reliable way to overcome that barrier. It combines a near-ubiquitous feature of Ugandan life, the cell phone, with recently introduced shared ride services.
With the team’s model, socioeconomically constrained mothers will receive a text-message reminder when it’s time to vaccinate their babies. A follow-up text gives access to vouchers for ride services, such as Uber and SafeBoda, to get them to clinics.
If the pilot is successful, Basta will scale up the concept to conduct a large, randomized trial to see if the voucher program consistently increases infant vaccination timeliness across Kampala.
The Model
The model reduces transportation barriers to timely vaccinations by using shared ride services. A cell phone delivers a text message reminder to a mother when an infant’s vaccinations are due and delivers a transportation voucher to provide access to clinics and other health services.
The Impact
If the trial shows that the intervention can remove transportation barriers and improve access to vaccines, the system could be used to help protect infants in similar settings around the globe from measles and other diseases.
