The Role of Vaccine Ambassadors on COVID-19 vaccine take-up in Indonesia

Treatment Group 1 -- In villages assigned to this treatment, we will approach local health cadres to serve as ambassadors for the COVID-19 vaccination program. We will recruit an effective science communicator to train ambassadors to deliver information in a consistent, compassionate, empathetic, and honest manner since communication is a key to convince people to get vaccinated. Training for the ambassadors will commence two weeks prior to the intervention delivery to ensure knowledge retention and effectiveness of the training. The training will be provided in both online and offline sessions. Online sessions will take 3 hours to complete, consisting of interactive lecture, discussion, and quiz. Offline sessions will consist of role-play sessions that will last 45 minutes to complete. The ambassador will be tasked with doing personal visits to respondents’ house. During the meeting, the ambassador will talk about scripted messages containing: General information about COVID-19, the private and social benefits of COVID-19 vaccine (e.g., higher vaccination rate translates to more freedom in movement and better economy), how to access the vaccine (such as location of vaccination site and registration help if needed), mortality and take-up rates in their district. Moral messages regarding responsibility of taking COVID-19 vaccine during emergency situations to protect others. The meetings will take place twice during the intervention period and take at most 30 minutes every time. The second meeting will take place a week after the first meeting. The second meeting will focus on clarifying respondents' understanding of the messages delivered by the ambassador in the first meeting. In addition to meetings, we will deliver leaflet containing information on private and social benefits of as well as reminder for getting Covid-19 vaccine. The leaflets will be designed specifically for this study. The leaflets will be delivered during the second meeting. Treatment Group 2 In the second intervention group, we will recruit an ambassador who has the same tasks as the ambassador in Treatment Group 1. The second group only differs in the selection mechanism. We will leverage social networks in the village to choose an ambassador in Treatment 2. We will ask a random subset of our sample in each village to nominate 3 individuals who in their view are respected, trusted, and good at spreading news and information in their village. To get a rather more complete picture of the situation in the village, we will also ask random vaccinated people—that we identified during screening—the same question. Afterwards, we will approach the individual who receives the most nominations and ask them to serve as the ambassador. The selected individuals should already be vaccinated or at least have registered to get vaccinated. All ambassadors in the treatment group 2 will receive the same training provided to the ambassadors in the treatment group 1. The duration of the intervention in all treatment groups (including control) will be two weeks : first home visit in the first week of intervention and second (and last) home visit in the following week. Quality control strategies : We will require all ambassadors to maintain participant logs, where we will check when the home visits will take place. The study team will do random check to the participants house during the planned visiting time. Additionally, we will do random spot check where we will call the participants and ask confirmatory questions to check whether ambassadors did delivered the intervention.