In a bid to close childhood immunisation gap in the country, the federal government in partnership with the World Health Organisation (WHO) has restrategised to immunise the 6.2 million children that did not receive any vaccine from 2019 to 2021, targeting 930,000 children annually.
WHO Team Lead, Vaccine Preventable Diseases and Polio Eradication, Dr. Kofi Boateng, disclosed this at the NPHCDA engagement with States on Optimised Outreach Strategy, in Abuja.
Boateng noted that the impact of COVID-19 has resulted to about 33 million children not receiving any vaccine from 2019 to 21.
He said the fact that these children have not received the vaccine is the reason the country is witnessing a lot of outbreaks like measles, diphtheria, yellow fever and others.
The meeting is to support Nigeria to get about 6.2 million children that did not receive any vaccine from 2019. So we are reviewing the strategies that the states are going to adopt to make sure that all health facilities intensify the RTGS in sessions, so that we can catch up on these numbers.
We have agreed that every year, we would reduce the burden of zero-dose by 15 percent (930,000), said Boateng.
Also, the executive director of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), Dr. Faisal Shuaib, said the country targets 80 percent immunisation by 2028.
He said „The 80 percent target, as clearly articulated in our strategy document developed in 2018 is going to be over a period of 10 years. So by 2028 We hope to achieve it, but one thing that I can assure you is that even ahead of 2028, We will be able to achieve this coverage.“
On strategies put in place to achieve this, Shuaib said „We are improving the leadership‘s building capacity of leaders that is on national level. We are increasing monitoring of the provision making sure that when health workers go from national to the state and from states to the local government level.
They are only looking at one entity immunisation so we got to fill that, so that is what we call an integrated participation. So these are tools that we are using to make sure that we are able to achieve our targets while also making sure that there is accountability.