Author
Listed:
- Isaac Nyarko Kwakye
- Daniel Adom-Fynn
- Nuworza Kugbey
- Kwame Benyibaling Bour
Abstract
This scoping review is intended to examine and consolidate the factors that influence the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines among African university students. Gaining an understanding of these factors is crucial for developing effective public health strategies to improve vaccination rates within this demographic. An extensive search of peer-reviewed publications was carried out in databases such as Pubmed, Ebsco host, Medline as well as Google and Google Scholar. The Critical Appraisal Skilled Programme Checklist (CASP) was used to evaluate the retrieved articles and presented in the PRISMA flow diagram. Ultimately, 10 articles satisfied the inclusion and exclusion requirements. The review generated five main themes: willingness/acceptance of COVID-19 vaccine, vaccination hesitancy, factors/reasons for vaccine willingness/acceptance, reasons/barriers for vaccine hesitancy, and source of vaccine information. The acceptance rate of vaccines varied across studies and ranged from 34.2% to 69%, while vaccine hesitancy ranged from 20.8% to 50%. Several factors influenced vaccination acceptance and hesitancy including fear of side effects, the desire to protect oneself and others, doubts about vaccine efficacy, and limited access to information on vaccination. Notably, social media became the frequently utilized source of vaccination-information among university students. The synthesized studies have revealed that vaccination acceptability among the African student population is low, while hesitancy is high. Therefore, public health education should be intensified among the Africa university students to stop COVID-19 transmission, improve vaccination acceptance, achieve herd immunity, and safeguard the health and wellness of the student body and the public.
Suggested Citation
Isaac Nyarko Kwakye & Daniel Adom-Fynn & Nuworza Kugbey & Kwame Benyibaling Bour, 2025.
"Exploring Factors Affecting Covid-19 Vaccine Uptake Among African University Students: A Scoping Review,"
SAGE Open, , vol. 15(2), pages 21582440251, May.
Handle:
RePEc:sae:sagope:v:15:y:2025:i:2:p:21582440251342094
DOI: 10.1177/21582440251342094
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:sagope:v:15:y:2025:i:2:p:21582440251342094. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.