Building confidence around immunizations
Supporting country-driven projects that leverage social media and behavioral science to build confidence around routine immunizations.
About The Vaxsocial Initiative
The VaxSocial Initiative is a $12 million initiative focused on demonstrating how social media can help build vaccine confidence.
AHO and Gavi recognize that while extensive research has been undertaken to understand vaccine hesitancy and social behaviors, more efforts are needed to understand how social media can most effectively be implemented to promote behavioral change for health in a cost-effective and equitable way. VaxSocial seeks to fill this gap by supporting country-driven projects that leverage social media and behavioral science to build confidence around routine immunizations and drive scale and replicability in approach across geographies.
Selected organizations from India, Indonesia and Nigeria were invited to apply through a process managed by Global Impact, the fiscal sponsor. The projects selected will explore innovative, promising approaches that leverage social media to empower and educate populations to make positive health choices around vaccination.
This Knowledge and Learning Hub will serve as a central platform for aggregating and sharing insights, best practices, and lessons learned from the VaxSocial Initiative projects. By facilitating collaboration and knowledge exchange among the participating organizations, the Hub aims to enhance the effectiveness of social media strategies in promoting vaccine confidence. It will also provide resources, tools, and guidance to help scale successful approaches across different regions and contexts. Ultimately, the Hub will contribute to building a global repository of evidence-based practices, enabling broader adoption of innovative strategies to increase vaccine uptake and improve public health outcomes.
About AHO
Advancing Health Online (AHO), a fiscally sponsored project of Global Impact, is an initiative launched and financially supported by Merck & Co. Inc. Rahway, NJ USA (known as MSD outside the United States and Canada) and Meta in June 2021 to advance public understanding of how social media can be utilized to better understand and increase the health and resiliency of communities around the world by bringing actors together from technology, health, global development, and the academic sector. AHO’s goal is to support effective integration of social media as a core component of social behavior change (SBC) to improve health outcomes. To achieve this, AHO collaborates with organizations working at the intersection of technology, global health, and SBC.
About Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance
Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance is a public-private partnership that helps vaccinate half the world’s children against some of the world’s deadliest diseases. Since its inception in 2000, Gavi has helped to immunize a whole generation – over 760 million children – and prevented more than 13 million deaths, helping to halve child mortality in 73 developing countries. Gavi also plays a key role in improving global health security by supporting health systems as well as funding global stockpiles for Ebola, cholera, meningitis and yellow fever vaccines. After two decades of progress, Gavi is now focused on protecting the next generation and reaching the unvaccinated children still being left behind, employing innovative finance and the latest technology – from drones to biometrics – to save millions more lives, prevent outbreaks before they can spread and help countries on the road to self-sufficiency.
About Global Impact
Global Impact serves as a trusted philanthropy advisor, intermediary, and nonprofit partner for greater giving. We offer advisory and infrastructure services that drive strategic philanthropy for our nonprofit, public, and private sector clients. With close to 70 years of experience, we have raised nearly $2.5 billion with our partners for global causes. Global Impact is part of Global Impact Ventures, a family of mission-driven organizations that serve all of philanthropy for a better world.
The VaxSocial funding recipients:
- GroupM Media India PVT. LTD. (India)
- Center for Indonesia’s Strategic Development Initiatives (Indonesia)
- Nivi and Save the Children (Nigeria)
- HelpMum and Behavioral Insights
Team (Nigeria) - Upswell, Behavioral Insights Lab, Silver Lining for the Needy Initiative, WellaHealth (Nigeria)
- IPSOS and M&C Saatchi World Services (Evaluator)
Explore VaxSocial's Valuable Resources
Sharing learnings and insights to harness the power of social media in building vaccine confidence.
