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Ghana COVID-19 Vaccinations and Financial Incentives

Last registered on January 11, 2022
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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Ghana COVID-19 Vaccinations and Financial Incentives
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0008775
Initial registration date
January 10, 2022

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
January 11, 2022, 9:02 AM EST

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Country
Ghana
Region
Africa

Primary Investigator

Name
Raymond Duch
Affiliation
University of Oxford
Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

Additional Trial Information

Status
In development
Start date
2022-01-17
End date
2022-04-30
Keywords
Behavior, Health
Additional Keywords
Health policy, Financial incentives, Behavioral economics, Vaccines, Cash payments, spill-over, RCT
JEL code(s)
D78, H41, I18
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
Achieving global vaccination against COVID-19 is a critical worldwide challenge. While COVAX is planning mass vaccination of Africa in 2022, there are substantial challenges. Cash incentives have been proposed as a way to improve the efficiency and equity of the roll-out in Africa. Recent experimental evidence suggests that financial incentives can promote the adoption of preventive health habits (Hussam etal 2022) and more specifically vaccine uptake (Campos Mercade etal 2021). To evaluate whether cash incentives affect the willingness to get the COVID-19 vaccine, we are undertaking a field experiment, designed and conducted in consultation with the University of Ghana and the Ghana Health Service. The experiment will evaluate the impact of cash incentives on vaccine uptake.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Duch, Raymond. 2022. "Ghana COVID-19 Vaccinations and Financial Incentives." AEA RCT Registry. January 11. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.8775-1.0
Sponsors & Partners

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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
The experiment has four treatments that are delivered in a short video:

Treatment 1: A placebo video that provides general information about the benefit of using solar power to charge household electrical appliances.

Treatment 2: Standard CDC COVID-19 vaccine promotional and information video.

Treatment 3: Low Cash Incentive treatment -- the first 30 seconds are identical to the CDC video -- the last 15 seconds inform viewers that that they will earn $3 if they provide proof of a COVID-19 vaccine within the next 6 weeks.

Treatment 4: High Cash Incentive treatment -- the first 30 seconds are identical to the CDC video -- the last 15 seconds inform viewers that that they will earn $10 if they provide proof of a COVID-19 vaccine within the next 6 weeks.
Intervention Start Date
2022-01-17
Intervention End Date
2022-02-28

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
The outcome variable is whether subjects received a COVID-19 vaccine after the initial video intervention. We will begin measuring the outcome for all 6,000 subjects after the six-week reporting period for the Low and High Cash treated subjects. We expect this to begin in approximately one week after the six-week deadline for Low and High cash subjects to indicate whether they had been vaccinated.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
We explicitly incorporate design features that will allow us to estimate the spillover effect of the video treatments -- non-treated experimental subjects who are affected indirectly by the COVID-19 video treatments.
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
The randomized control trial is designed to measure the direct impact of financial incentives on individual vaccine update rates in the Ghana rural population. The clustered randomized control trial will randomly select 6,552 participants from selected rural households; in 312. villages and from 6 Ghana Districts. We adopted a cluster random assignment design in order to address spillover effects that could have important implications for evaluating the overall benefits (and costs) of implementing financial incentives for vaccine uptake.

Village clusters are randomly assigned to receive on of four video treatment arms: a placebo, a standard health message, a high cash incentive ($10) and a low cash incentive ($3). Randomly selected participants within a village will be assigned to one of the four video treatment arms. In addition, a proportion of subjects (25 percent) within village clusters assigned to one of the three treatment arms receive the placebo treatment. We incorporate placebo treatments in the design in order to facilitate the identification of both direct and indirect treatment effects that are decoupled from the delivery mechanism.
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
Villages are randomly selected from population ranked quadruples by a computerized random number generated. Households are randomly selected by random walk instructions. Individuals within households are randomly selected by a coin flip.
Randomization Unit
Villages, households and individuals within households
Was the treatment clustered?
Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
312 Village clusters.
Sample size: planned number of observations
6,500 individuals
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
1,625
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
The unit is the individual with a standard deviation of 0.37. The minimum detectable effect size is 0.06.
Supporting Documents and Materials

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IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Economics Ethics Committee
IRB Approval Date
2022-01-05
IRB Approval Number
ECONCIA21-22-28
Analysis Plan

Analysis Plan Documents

Ghana Vaccination Incentives

MD5: 44742352b60c38850a60a30a7f4f58bc

SHA1: c520d33841ce74e4ed7e2776e86f536e26e5a209

Uploaded At: January 10, 2022

Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
No
Data Collection Complete
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Reports & Other Materials