Why Mon in Nagaland, India is our first pilot?

We are piloting the Vaccine Hesitancy Lab in Mon, a highly rural district in the Northeastern state of Nagaland in India. This district presents unique challenges and benefits which makes it one of the exciting places where we decided to deploy our concept first. In this note we describe some of the factors behind its selection: 

First, Mon is a remote and predominantly digitally dark location, which makes it difficult to collect large digital footprints at scale, that are necessary to understand people’s behavior. With 45% of the global population living in rural areas, a segment of individuals that is also likely to be more vaccine hesitant, this is a challenge that we needed to tackle head-on to test the Lab’s capability to deliver. 

Second, even while digitally dark, peer to peer channels such as WhatsApp have been a major source for seeding misinformation within the communities – such misinformation have a greater tendency to propagate offline due to their often conspiratorial and more appealing nature. This selective nature of digital channels in spread of information makes it difficult to leverage them for tackling misinformation. Through this pilot, we wanted to understand what combination of offline + online solutions might help improve the vaccine acceptance in a difficult scenario such as this one.

Third, the district has a highly homogeneous population. According to 2011 census, ~ 85% of the district population is rural, with 95% being tribal population and ~95% belonging to same religion - Christianity. This enables us to identify reliable trends with relatively smaller sample sizes, test prototypes quickly, and makes it easier to understand the impact of the prototypes.

“In the last two vaccination drives for nearby villages, we had more vaccine vials remaining at the health centre than the people who showed up to take Covid-19 vaccine.” - Nurse, Mon, Nagaland

Finally, a driven district administration, with a strong buy-in into the process and outcome. Support of implementation partner, including relevant government authorities is a critical part of implementing such a tightly scheduled pilot successfully.

Authored by: Adityendra Suman, Senior Project Manager, Dalberg