Promoting Vaccination: A Toolkit for Collaborating with Faith Communities

"Faith leaders and elders can inspire vaccine enthusiasm and address their faith community's fears by making theological statements on vaccine acceptability and working closely with the Ministries of Health to disseminate evidence-based, faith-informed vaccination behavior change communication messages."

Low vaccine confidence remains a significant barrier across the globe. Regardless of whether vaccine hesitancy stems from myths and misinformation, beliefs and fears, or religious convictions, faith actors are potential partners in the development of tailored activities for improving vaccine uptake. Religious leaders can be supported and encouraged to use their trusted position of influence, unique understanding of their congregants, and important insights from behavioural science to engage in personalised vaccine promotion outreach in their networks. This toolkit aims to equip faith actors and related stakeholders with the information and tools needed to raise awareness, reduce misinformation, and address barriers that prevent faith communities in particular from engaging in vaccination.

This toolkit is funded as a part of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)'s MOMENTUM Country and Global Leadership project, which includes an initiative to identify and address concerns among religious leaders and faith-based communities around vaccination. From 2020 to 2021, the project completed a global landscape analysis and key informant interviews of key efforts for engaging faith leaders in vaccination. (See Related Summaries, below.) Building on these efforts, focus group discussions were held with religious leaders to solicit their direct feedback on how faith communities can collaborate to generate vaccine demand and increase vaccine confidence.

The toolkit's main sections include:

• Toolkit Introduction: Includes step-by-step guidance on how to engage faith communities to promote vaccination through "vaccine advocates and influencers"
• Theological Dimensions of Vaccination: Faith-specific messages for promoting vaccination and responding to vaccine hesitancy
• Guidance for Holding Vaccination Discussions: Understanding barriers and facilitators to behaviour change and recommendations for communicating about vaccination
• Social Media Messagaging: Examples of faith-tailored social media messages
• Annexes: Guidance briefs on holding inter-faith discussion forums on vaccine promotion, developing harmonised inter-faith campaigns, and engaging faith-based scientific technical bodies

Tools and messaging terminology may be adapted to fit your local context and language that will be understood by the audience. Readers are encouraged to supplement the toolkit as needed with local statistics or contextual information that reflects the tribal, cultural, or national context. Conversation guides, religious text references, meeting templates, and social media messages can be printed out for easy reference or pulled out as standalone tools.