Grant Partner Coalition

Sabin’s Vaccine Acceptance & Demand Initiative aims to facilitate global collaboration among researchers focused on the social and behavioral drivers of vaccination. We’re doing this by developing a research-focused community of practice built around our Social and Behavioral Research Grants Program recipients. This coalition comprises partners from our previous grant cycles and will be open to all future grantees in the program.

2023 Coalition meeting

More than 40 public health researchers and practitioners who are members of the current and former cohorts of the Social and Behavioral Research Grant (SBRG) Partners Program met in Bangkok ahead of the 2nd Annual Conference of the Vaccination Acceptance Research Network, VARN2023.

Together they shared experiences and knowledge toward finding solutions capable of addressing the gaps and obstacles for immunization in their communities and beyond. The participants of the 2nd Annual Coalition Meeting for SBRG partners — an engaged community and learning group — also held conversations around building adaptive leadership and community activation to build back immunity.

Teams from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, Melanesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sierra Leone – all members of the 2023-2024 cohort – presented their recently announced projects and had a chance to engage in rich discussions with peers from previous participants of the program and several other health experts. Their projects are focused on the following themes:

• Recovering lost gains in routine childhood immunizations as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic
• Building effective life-course vaccination programs in a post-pandemic world
• Operationalizing the World Health Organization’s behavioral and social drivers (BesD) of vaccine uptake framework

2022 coalition Meeting

The inaugural meeting of the Social and Behavioral Research Partner Coalition was held over three days in July 2022 in Dubai, U.A.E. with representatives from 18 research projects across 10 countries funded over our three previous grant cycles. This meeting provided an opportunity for the current grantees to present on their research progress and discuss challenges and opportunities experienced, including the importance of:

• Co-designed interventions
• Research for, by, and with marginalized communities
• Establishing trust
• Relationship building

Research teams from all three grant program cycles engaged with Lisa Menning from WHO on the Behavioral and Social Drivers of Vaccination (BeSD) Framework, learned about community co-design workshops, and brainstormed how the research community can take forward themes emerging from the VARN2022 conference. Sabin also sponsored a full day communications and advocacy training on translating research into action. Research teams workshopped strategic communications plans to disseminate their findings.

Most importantly, grant partners were able to connect with their colleagues in-person. From the positive feedback we received on this event, this growing coalition of researchers is energized to advance research and collaborations that improve our understanding of the social and behavioral drivers of vaccination.

Listening & learning

The grant partner coalition provides essential input for future grant cycles, helping to develop research tracks offered in the call for proposals.

If you are a researcher working to understand and improve vaccine acceptance and demand in a low- middle-income country? Apply for funding for the next social and behavioral research grant cycle!