Willingness to take and pay for Covid-19 vaccination in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Kenya and Ethiopia

The COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing vaccination campaigns call for decisive, internationally coordinated and forward-looking action. Widespread acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines is crucial for achieving sufficient immunization coverage to end the global pandemic, yet few studies have investigated COVID-19 vaccination attitudes in African countries. We analyze the willingness to take and pay for COVID-19 vaccines based on nationally representative in-person surveys in Kenya and Ethiopia, including a total of 4,932 households.

We find a high willingness to take COVID-19 vaccines, but a low willingness to pay for it. Vaccine acceptance is significantly associated with trust in government and pro-social behavior, while willingness to pay is related to income and health insurance coverage. Evidence suggests that the key constraint is not vaccine hesitancy but ability to pay for COVID-19 vaccines. The latter is likely to impede control of the pandemic if external funding for vaccination campaigns remains insufficient. Context-specific combinations of access to free and to fairly-priced vaccines will be needed to ensure high uptake of COVID-19 vaccines in African countries.

Authors: Arjun Bedi (Erasmus University Rotterdam) Matthias Rieger (Erasmus University Rotterdam) Emmanuel Rukundo (University Bonn) Zemzem Shigute (Erasmus University Rotterdam) Christoph Strupat (DIE)

Speaker: Dr. Christoph Strupat is researcher at the German Development Institute (DIE) in Bonn

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