Varsha Venugopal

We haven't figured out the answer yet.

What we have agreed on, Fiona and I, is our focus is on this problem of under-immunization.

And that's what we want to resolve first before we move on to other things.

Having said that, there have been...

Maybe we can call them distractions throughout the process from funders or otherwise.

For instance, in India, we had a foundation that was interested in using our SMS reminders for students in schools on a whole host of behaviors around taking their folic acid or being clean, etc.

And we went some way in there before realizing, OK, this was distracting and probably not

taking us away from our core focus.

Another example, which is probably more, I guess, salient is around COVID vaccines.

Can our nudges, especially around ambassadors, be useful for getting more people to take their COVID vaccine?

And this was something that came up

in some earlier discussions with our colleagues at J-PAL, and they have been looking further into it.

We have also been following the research in India on the different reasons for hesitancy.

We are aware it's very different from routine immunization in terms of drop-offs.

A, we are talking about adults,

B, it may not be a high trust area.

And C, there may be other challenges around cost, which with routine immunization, it's provided free of cost, whereas for COVID vaccine, there may be a cost element.

So all of that makes us fairly hesitant to enter that area, but it's not something we have completely ruled out.

And that's also an area where CE has been quite helpful and useful, having mentors and advisors who keep kind of nudging us back on track so we don't get distracted by all these other huge problems where we could potentially make a dent on, but would take us away from our core focus.

Having said that, this whole immunization ambassador model and this idea of systematically identifying community nodes is really promising and exciting and possibly has other low-hanging fruits that it could have an impact on.