In Bolivia, a country in the center of South America, only half of the population has received the Covid-19 vaccine. The government of Luis Arce has secured 23.8 million doses, but in December 2022, only 6 million individuals – in a country of 11.8 million people – have received the first and second doses, according to information provided by the Bolivian Department of Health and Sport.

In January 2022, the Bolivian government launched a campaign to highlight the need for the vaccine among sectors of the populations that were refusing to be vaccinated. These included indigenous communities and their leaders.

Resistance to vaccination even included senior officials, such as the vice-president of Bolivia, David Choquehuanca, of Aymara origin, who only agreed to receive the first dose of the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine in January 2022. It was administered by the Health Secretary, Jeyson Auza, according to France24.

Though one of Bolivia’s official languages is Spanish, in view of the reticence by certain sectors of the population to get vaccinated, the ChequeaBolivia team identified the audience that they wished to reach to debunk fake news or disinformation on Covid-19 vaccines. They developed a podcast in two key native languages to reach large sectors of Bolivian society: aymara (or aimara, depending on the spelling rule) and quechua. Both languages are named after indigenous communities that live in Bolivia even before Spanish colonization.

It is estimated that currently 2 million people speak Aymara in Bolivia, Chile and Peru, according to a recent BBC article. There are also communities that speak this language in southern Ecuador and northern Argentina.

Quechua or quichua is the most widespread native language on the American continent, says the BBC. It was used by the Incas, who expanded their empire throughout a large part of the South American continent, introducing the language through this process.

The ChequeaBolivia team used various innovation tools and planned a strategy to achieve an agile, dynamic script destined for listeners of different ages and origins. They developed three versions of the same podcast (Aymara, Quechua and Spanish) with a clear objective: disprove the confusing and misleading ideas about the effects of the vaccine, its components and the risks that its application can cause. You can listen to the finished product in the Podcast section of the Fact-Checking Laboratory.