Performance Management on Community Distribution Vaccine Indicator and Reminder

Timeline: November 2015 – April 2017 | Status: Completed

Nigeria.

Project Overview

Improving childhood immunisation requires approaches that help families initiate vaccination and continue through recommended immunisation schedules, particularly in communities where access to routine primary health services may be limited.

From November 2015 to April 2017, the Health Strategy and Delivery Foundation (HSDF), in collaboration with DLC and other independent researchers, implemented and assessed the feasibility of a community-based approach for distributing an innovative Vaccine Indicator and Reminder (VIR) band in Nigeria.

The project, funded by the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), explored whether community-based workers could support the distribution of the VIR band as a practical way of improving immunisation initiation and uptake among infants.

Ensuring that infants begin and continue receiving essential vaccinations can be particularly challenging in underserved communities.

Families may interact with community-based providers and traditional birth attendants even where their engagement with formal health facilities is less consistent. This creates an opportunity to explore whether community-level delivery mechanisms can help extend the reach of important primary health interventions.

The project therefore examined the feasibility of using community-based workers to distribute a simple reminder intervention designed to support infant immunisation.

Working alongside DLC and independent researchers, HSDF implemented and assessed the feasibility of community-based distribution of the VIR band.

The project focused on:

Assessing the feasibility of distributing the VIR band through community-based channels.
Exploring the potential of the intervention to support immunisation initiation and uptake among infants.
Examining the role community-based workers could play in delivering the intervention.
Considering traditional birth attendants as part of community-level delivery mechanisms.
Generating evidence to inform future programming for underserved communities.

Rather than focusing only on the reminder tool itself, the study helped explore how existing community actors could potentially serve as channels for delivering basic primary health interventions.