Mobarak in Financial Times: "Living in remote areas shouldn’t be a death sentence"
EGC affiliate Mushfiq Mobarak authored a commentary in Financial Times on how mobile phone usage patterns can help to predict poverty and target service delivery in hard to reach places.
Financial Times
August 20, 2025
In late 2021, about a year after the first Covid-19 vaccines came to market, vaccination rates remained disturbingly low in many African countries. As the months passed, the gap in vaccine coverage increased. When asked why Africa was not receiving the vaccine while North America and Europe were getting saturated with excess doses, some pharmaceutical executives blamed vaccine hesitancy. Lack of doses was not the constraint, they argued; hesitancy kept supplied doses from being used before they expired.
My colleagues and I sought to evaluate this claim. Co-ordinated surveys of vaccine hesitancy across 10 countries in the global south plus the US and Russia revealed that residents of nearly all nations in our sample were more willing to take the vaccine than Americans or Russians. The reason for low vaccine coverage was more mundane: a simple lack of access.