Pago Pago, AMERICAN SAMOA — The Office of Procurement published on Oct. 25th in Samoa News, a request for proposal (RFP) from qualified firms for the “COVID-19 Vaccine Engagement Plan”. Haven’t seen any article by Samoa News on what this project is all about. And some of us in the community are curious about it.

Any information on what this project is? Just Asking?

Samoa News staff reply:

The RFP document received by Samoa News recently outlines the Scope of Work for this project, saying that the American Samoa Immunization Program — which is overseen by the Health Department — is requesting the assistance of a qualified firm to implement three specific issues.

The first one is to develop and implement community engagement strategies to promote COVID-19 vaccination efforts:

•           support broad education efforts that explain to the public options for how/where/when they can get the COVID-19 vaccine in their communities;

•           fund partnership for community engagement to identify trusted voices that represent the diversity of affected communities to promote vaccination and have bidirectional conversations in communities with vaccine hesitancy. These partnerships need to reflect the diversity of the jurisdiction’s population;

•           implement a rapid community assessment guide to diagnose potential barriers and identify solutions to low vaccine uptake or vaccine confidence in specific communities; and

•           fund community-based organizations and build local partnerships or coalitions to allow for coordinated activities across community organizations working to promote vaccine confidence. An example of community-based organizations include social service agencies, non-profit organizations, and formal and informal community groups, like neighborhood groups or recreational or special-interest clubs.

The second issue is, increase vaccine confidence through education, outreach and partnerships:

•           enhance/amplify messaging — including through translation — to promote COVID-19 vaccination, especially among underserved populations for the Samoans, Tongans, Chinese, Koreans and Fijians;

•           fund local education campaigns and approaches to adapting U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) materials to community audience, including a focus on racial and ethnic minority groups;

•           share education, outreach and marketing approaches and materials with CDC and others engaged in similar activities to allow for national dissemination;

•           address vaccine education efforts to include addressing possible vaccination misinformation and increase vaccine confidence and vaccine uptake, including with racial and ethnic minority groups; and

•           promote COVID-19 and other vaccinations to increase vaccine confidence in racial and ethnic minority groups and to increase accessibility for people with disabilities.

The third and final prong to implement by the winning firm is to provide data back to DoH to enhance current protocols. And this calls for collaboration with DoH and all related agencies in scheduling presentations and to providing the data and all deliverables.

Details of the RFP are available at the Procurement Office.