Executive summary: Notify Health’s pilot vaccination reminder program in Nigeria shows promising early evidence that scalable, low-cost SMS and voice call reminders can significantly improve timely childhood vaccination rates by addressing caregiver knowledge gaps, with a clear plan to expand and enhance cost-effectiveness despite some measurement limitations.
Key points:
Problem context: Millions of children, especially in Nigeria, miss routine vaccinations due to knowledge barriers like forgetting appointments or misunderstanding schedules; Nigeria has the world’s highest number of zero-dose children.
Intervention design: Notify Health uses digitized immunization registers and automated SMS plus voice reminders (in local languages) sent before vaccine due dates to caregivers, addressing the demand-side gap inexpensively and at scale.
Pilot results: Over 2,200 children were enrolled in Kogi State, achieving improved data quality and sending 42,000+ reminders; timely vaccination rates for key vaccines (Penta-1 and Penta-2) rose by 12–24 percentage points among enrolled children compared to unenrolled peers.
Caregiver feedback and operational feasibility: Most caregivers found reminders helpful, and the automated system handled high message volumes well; however, a notable share of phone numbers were inaccurate, highlighting data quality challenges.
Limitations and interpretation: The observational pilot lacks a randomized control, making causality uncertain; improvements could partly stem from concurrent government campaigns or better record keeping, but results align with existing evidence and plausible mechanisms.
Cost-effectiveness and future plans: Current estimates suggest the program is roughly 5x more cost-effective than unconditional cash transfers, with clear strategies to enroll broader populations, reduce costs (e.g., by shifting photo capture to health workers), pilot in new states, and conduct rigorous evaluations to strengthen causal claims and scale impact.
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Executive summary: Notify Health’s pilot vaccination reminder program in Nigeria shows promising early evidence that scalable, low-cost SMS and voice call reminders can significantly improve timely childhood vaccination rates by addressing caregiver knowledge gaps, with a clear plan to expand and enhance cost-effectiveness despite some measurement limitations.
Key points:
Problem context: Millions of children, especially in Nigeria, miss routine vaccinations due to knowledge barriers like forgetting appointments or misunderstanding schedules; Nigeria has the world’s highest number of zero-dose children.
Intervention design: Notify Health uses digitized immunization registers and automated SMS plus voice reminders (in local languages) sent before vaccine due dates to caregivers, addressing the demand-side gap inexpensively and at scale.
Pilot results: Over 2,200 children were enrolled in Kogi State, achieving improved data quality and sending 42,000+ reminders; timely vaccination rates for key vaccines (Penta-1 and Penta-2) rose by 12–24 percentage points among enrolled children compared to unenrolled peers.
Caregiver feedback and operational feasibility: Most caregivers found reminders helpful, and the automated system handled high message volumes well; however, a notable share of phone numbers were inaccurate, highlighting data quality challenges.
Limitations and interpretation: The observational pilot lacks a randomized control, making causality uncertain; improvements could partly stem from concurrent government campaigns or better record keeping, but results align with existing evidence and plausible mechanisms.
Cost-effectiveness and future plans: Current estimates suggest the program is roughly 5x more cost-effective than unconditional cash transfers, with clear strategies to enroll broader populations, reduce costs (e.g., by shifting photo capture to health workers), pilot in new states, and conduct rigorous evaluations to strengthen causal claims and scale impact.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.