Trust is one of those terms that everyone has an intuition about and that we expect to matter in our interactions with one another. At the same time, trust is often both elusive and untapped. 

The Vaccine Trust Project aims to change this and make trust a strategic lever that helps build vaccine demand in a world where prioritizing vaccine supply alone has proved to be insufficient to eliminate zero-dose children, effectively contain a virus, or eradicate diseases.   

ReD Associates, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [#1,#2,] has explored the role of trust in vaccine uptake in Kenya, Pakistan, and Nigeria since 2021 to understand what trust is, how to measure it, and ultimately how to leverage trust to drive vaccine uptake and build resilient health systems.  

The Vaccine Trust Project has resulted in a comprehensive trust measurement:
The Vaccine Trust Framework.

The Framework compounds four trust types:
1) Trust in the health system promise,
2) Trust in healthcare delivery,
3) Trust in the vaccine promise,
4) Trust in vaccine delivery.

It provides a nuanced trust measure that accounts for people’s overall experiences with healthcare systems as well as their perceptions surrounding specific vaccines. We have built a trust tool that allows policymakers, and others working on immunization and vaccines more broadly to identify trust barriers to vaccine uptake and inform the development of targeted trust-building efforts to address the barriers and increase vaccine uptake.  

The results from the Vaccine Trust Project are clear: high trust drives vaccine uptake. When trust increases, people are more likely to accept vaccines for themselves or on behalf of their children, making trust a critical lever to drive vaccine demand in the future.  

On this page, you can delve into insights from the Vaccine Trust Project from Kenya, Pakistan, and Nigeria that cover both the COVID-19 and HPV vaccines, explore the Vaccine Trust Survey Tool to measure trust yourself and access the survey data to dive deeper into the world of Vaccine Trust.  

Links to footnotes:  

#1: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants/2021/06/inv029231 

#2: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants/2022/10/inv-045248