Research fellow Amanda Glassman and Dr. Orin Levine's post on vaccines was published in The Huffington Post.
From the Article
In low- and middle-income countries, children living in poverty are less likely to be vaccinated -- and more likely to die or become ill from a vaccine-preventable disease -- than wealthier children.
A perfect example of this can be found in Nigeria, where less than 5 percent of children in the lowest quintile of the wealth distribution were fully vaccinated in 2003 -- as opposed to 40 percent of children in the wealthiest quintile.
Although a lack of effective supply and distribution systems limits the reach of immunizations -- especially to "last mile" populations -- much progress has been made and innovative strategies are underway to strengthen vaccine supply chains.
However, as CGD's Charles Kenny noted last month in "Foreign Policy," few efforts focus on the "demand-side" -- the barriers that poor families face when considering whether or not to vaccinate their children. Yet according to recent impact evaluations, providing modest cash or in-kind incentives to poor families conditional on vaccination of their children has worked in at least five developing country settings. Based on these positive evaluations, we believe that conditional transfer programs are a promising demand-side way to address vaccination coverage levels that should be tried and evaluated in multiple settings.