Examining drivers of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in Ghana

Report 3, published 19 July 2021. Fully open-access.

We conducted a nationally representative online survey in Ghana (N = 1295) throughout June 2021.

In our analyses, we operationalised vaccine hesitancy as respondents who answered ‘no’ and ‘I don’t know’ to the question: “When a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available to you, would you like to get vaccinated?”

Some top-level findings to share
- willingness to vaccinate dropped from 82% in March, to 71% in June 2021
- Therefore, to phrase another way, there was an observed and significant increase in hesitancy, from 18% to 29% across this time period.
- 32% of respondents reported that they had recently seen or heard stories about the indecision surrounding the Oxford Astrazeneca vaccine rollout in Europe and North America. Of this 32% subgroup, 62.0% of them indicated that these stories made them feel worried about accepting the COVID-19 vaccine in the future.
- our main predictors of hesitancy continue to include: i) education (more educated people were more likely to be hesitant; one hypothesis is perhaps more likely to have greater access to the internet and thus availability of misinformation via social media); ii) females more hesitant than males; and iii) political allegiance (voting for the opposition parties was greater predictor of hesitancy).

We hope that this information can be helpful with informing the health promotion efforts from the GHS, Ministry of Health and other stakeholders.

For the previous report from this series of Ghana surveys (covering surveys in August 2020 and March 2021), see https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351327020_Examining_drivers_of_COVID-19_vaccine_hesitancy_in_Ghana