Request for proposal services: Social Media Listening and Rapid Assessment Survey of Lesotho Health Workers and Population to accept COVID-19 Vaccine

In January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a Public Health

Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). The outbreak has infected millions of people across the world and

caused significant loss of lives. To protect people from the disease, vaccines against COVID have been developed

by several manufacturers in a number of countries. It is expected that there will only be a limited number of

vaccines produced in the early days, and gradually scaled up. Hence, countries will need to prioritize population

who will receive the vaccine in the first round.

WHO's Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) has provided recommendations about which populations should be prioritized first. These include frontline health and care workers at high risk of infection then older adults, and those people at high risk of death because of underlying conditions like heart disease and diabetes. In the third phase of the roll-out, as more doses are produced, the vaccine should go to groups less at risk of being infected or of suffering badly. The decision will ultimately be made by national governments.

There is growing evidence of vaccine delays or refusals due to a lack of trust in the importance, safety, or

effectiveness of vaccines, alongside persisting access issues. Community trust is key to ensure vaccine uptake and buy-in. To build trust, it is important to understand how communities perceive the disease and what are their main questions, doubts, and fears around vaccines, generally, and towards COVID-19 vaccine, more specifically.

Previous experience of pandemics and communities risk perception about the disease can also influence vaccine

uptake.

Lack of trust in service providers, past negative experience of vaccination and poor quality of services

including negative attitude of service providers may also affect the decision to accept a new vaccine in certain

contexts. Similarly, it will be important to understand the trusted source of vaccine, influencers etc.

It is vital to understand how people think, feel, and act in relation to a vaccine when developing strategies to

generate acceptance and uptake for the vaccine.

Gathering and using quality data on the behavioral and social drivers of vaccination will enable the Ministry of Health to design, target, and evaluate interventions to achieve greater impact with more efficiency, and to examine and understand comparable trends over time. Hence the objective of the exercise to engage a research agency to generate evidence from social listening and behavior and social data from a representative sample of health workers and individual adults by asking questions around knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, action and social drivers of family members, communities or service providers on covid-19 vaccination.

The results from this survey inform an advocacy communication and social mobilization (ACSM) plan to guide the

introduction of the COVID19  vaccine in Lesotho. It will be important for the country to have a good advocacy communication and social mobilization (ACSM) plan in line with Government's decision of prioritization of the population. The ACSM plan will have a strong community engagement component, include social listening and community feedback mechanism and evidence-based communication approaches.