Developing countries have been facing difficulties in reaching out to low-income and underserved communities for COVID-19 vaccination coverage. The rapidity of vaccine development caused a mistrust among certain subgroups of the population, and hence innovative approaches were taken to reach out to such populations. Using a sample of 1760 respondents in five low-income, informal localities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, Pakistan, we evaluated a set of interventions involving community engagement by addressing demand and access barriers. We used multi-level mixed effects models to estimate average treatment effects across treatment areas. We found that our interventions increased COVID-19 vaccine willingness in two treatment areas that are furthest from city centers by 7.6% and 6.6% respectively, while vaccine uptake increased in one of the treatment areas by 17.1%, compared to the control area. Our results suggest that personalized information campaigns such as community mobilization help to increase COVID-19 vaccine willingness. Increasing uptake however, requires improving access to the vaccination services. Both information and access may be different for various communities and therefore a "one-size-fits-all" approach may need to be better localized. Such underserved and marginalized communities are better served if vaccination efforts are contextualized.
Copyright: © 2022 Abdullah et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.