Presentation

Improving access to first dose of Oral Polio Vaccine through community volunteers: The CGPP experience

The Polio Eradication Initiative in Nigeria, which started >20 years ago, faced many challenges, including initial denial, resistance from communities, and prolonged regional safety concern. Since the onset of the PEI program in Nigeria, the use of community volunteers at the community level has led to improvement in the acceptance of the oral polio vaccine.

As shown by the CGPP intervention in 5 of the 11 Polio High Risk states in Northern Nigeria, access to be OPV0 can be improved by using local community volunteers who are from the local community, are properly trained and can effectively mobilize the community using various community-level mobilization activities. Starting from an OPV coverage of just 47% in CGPP focal areas in the five states where CGPP is working, the CGPP VCMs have been able to improve OPV0 coverage by 52.1% to 99.1%. This is a testament to the success of their work

Now that Nigeria and the rest of Africa has been certified free from the indigenous Wild Polio Virus (WPV), the CGPP VCMs will be focused on mobilizing the communities to access Routine Immunization at the facility level.

With the current emphasis on Routine Immunization (RI), CGPP will be using the VCM register to measuring the coverage of the third dose of the pentavalent vaccine (penta3) which is a very indicator for RI coverage.