Digital payments for vaccine campaigns: an executive summary

Prompt, regular, and accurate payments promise big improvements in health campaigns, such as vaccines, that rely on a large workforce of last-mile health workers. Digital payments facilitate recruitment and continued motivation. Programs stand to save substantial amounts associated with cash due to errors, fraud, accounting controls, and security. The timeliness and accuracy of payments for a vaccine campaign are critical determinants of the morale of the vaccine workforce. Controlling errors, delays, and fraud holds the potential to improve the efficacy of a campaign and, by extension, deliver on the mission. 

The unit cost of digital payments is 20% higher than that of cash payments for vaccine campaigns unless fraud control and prompt payments are taken into account. Considering these factors, however, the cost of digital payments is 67% lower than cash.

The aggregate value of the benefits of embedded digital services is sufficient to offset 74% of the cost of administering payments. 

The largest component of this value is the promptness of the payment itself. Here, we have discounted that value by 80% relative to what research shows is the true value.

Fraud control is the second largest service embedded in digital payments. 

Payment confirmations, while extremely important for accounting and customer service, are not particularly expensive to replicate by telephoning recipients of payments.

The likely direction of bias in this study is to understate the benefits of digital payments. Our figures for the value of fraud control and prompt payments probably under-state the extent of these issues. 

Reusable databases of payment credentials can save 30% of the unit cost of payments by reducing the burden of enrolling frontline staff during the hiring and training phase.

Payees are enthusiastic supporters of digital payments, whether through banks or mobile money. More than 80 percent of frontline staff reported preferring to receive their payments into accounts.

Check out the full series

1. Visualizing what it takes to generate a payment in the healthcare sector: the payment use case map
2. Quantifying the benefits of a transition to digital payments for frontline healthcare workers
3. How digital payments affect key institutions in vaccine campaigns: a stakeholder analysis

Read more 

1. Research highlights (PDF)
2. Payment use case map (PDF)
3. Value of embedded services (PDF)
4. Scenarios for scale and sister programs (PDF) 

This material was prepared for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The findings and conclusions contained within are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.