Less than 30% of people in Africa received a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine even 18 months after vaccine development. Here, motivated by the observation that residents of remote, rural areas of Sierra Leone faced severe access difficulties, we conducted an intervention with last-mile delivery of doses and health professionals to the most inaccessible areas, along with community mobilization. A cluster randomized controlled trial in 150 communities showed that this intervention with mobile vaccination teams increased the immunization rate by about 26 percentage points within 48–72 h. Moreover, auxiliary populations visited our community vaccination points, which more than doubled the number of inoculations administered. The additional people vaccinated per intervention site translated to an implementation cost of US $33 per person vaccinated. Transportation to reach remote villages accounted for a large share of total intervention costs. Therefore, bundling multiple maternal and child health interventions in the same visit would further reduce costs per person treated. Current research on vaccine delivery maintains a large focus on individual behavioural issues such as hesitancy. Our study demonstrates that prioritizing mobile services to overcome access difficulties faced by remote populations in developing countries can generate increased returns in terms of uptake of health services.
We track the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health in eight Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) in Asia, Africa, and South America utilizing repeated surveys of 21,162 individuals. Many respondents were interviewed over multiple rounds pre- and post-pandemic, allowing us to control for time trends and within-year seasonal variation in mental health. We demonstrate how mental health fluctuates with agricultural crop cycles, deteriorating during pre-harvest “lean” periods. Ignoring this seasonal variation leads to unreliable inferences about the effects of the pandemic. Controlling for seasonality, we document a large, significant, negative impact of the pandemic on mental health, especially during the early months of lockdown. In a random effects aggregation across samples, depression symptoms increased by around 0.3 standard deviations in the four months following the onset of the pandemic. The pandemic could leave a lasting legacy of depression. Absent policy interventions, this could have adverse long-term consequences, particularly in settings with limited mental health support services, which is characteristic of many LMICs.
We use a two-stage experiment to study how a short-term subsidy for a new product affects uptake, usage, and future demand for the same product (a new solar lamp). We use an auction design to gauge willingness-to-pay, and randomly vary the strike price across villages to create random variation in purchase prices and uptake across villages. Our main results are that subsidies do not adversely affect subsequent product use, but stimulate uptake. If subsidies depress future willingness-to-pay, then this effect is outweighed by additional learning about the benefits of the new product. The net effect is that short-term subsidies increase future willingness-to-pay. However; prices play an important allocative role, and lowering prices via subsidies encourages uptake by households with low use intensity. We do not find any evidence supporting social learning and anchoring beyond the initial sample of beneficiaries.