Programs & Projects

Populations in low-and-middle-income countries face a variety of barriers to receiving vaccinations, such as vaccine stockouts, cold chain breakdowns, difficulty traveling to a clinic or a lack of sufficiently trained clinic staff.  New vaccine technologies have the potential to reduce or eliminate many of these barriers, but the impact of such reductions on actual immunization rates is not clear.

To address this gap, WDI’s Healthcare Team is developing a model to estimate the change in immunization coverage rates associated with a new vaccine introduction. The model includes six main barriers that can be addressed by new technologies. It first considers the prevalence of these barriers in the target population and then considers how effectively a new technology can address those same barriers. Those two factors are combined to estimate the change in population experiencing a barrier, which in turn influences overall immunization coverage levels. This model will help inform donor investment strategy by identifying high-priority new vaccine attributes and pairing them with high-impact target populations.