The United Nation Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has declared that 2.2 million Nigerian children of the 48 million global children, did not receive a single regular dose immunization in their lives.
Of these number, Sokoto, Kebbi, Zamfara states account for a total of 186,452 children that did not receive a single dose of any vaccine in the Routine National Immunization Schedule as at December 2022.
And of the 186,452 children, Sokoto state accounts for 122,015 zero dose children in 13 local government areas.
UNICEF field Officer Dr. Danjuma Nehemiah, disclosed this during a recent two-day Media Dialogue on Routine Immunization and the Zero-Dose Campaign organized by UNICEF in collaboration with the Primary Healthcare Development Agencies of the three states.
“When we talk about ‘zero dose immunization’, we are referring to children who did not receive a single dose of antigens they should have taken at their age to give them protection from vaccine-preventable diseases. These are the children we referred to as, ‘zero-dose children’
“In spite of decades of progress to increase access to immunization in lower-income countries, at least 12.4 million children still go without basic routine vaccines every year.
“UNICEF is now focusing on reaching these zero-dose children because zero-dose children account for nearly half of all vaccine-preventable deaths,” Nehemiah had said.
He, however, said that the goal is to reduce the number of zero-dose children by 25 per cent by 2025, and by 50 per cent by 2030, which would also mark the closing of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
According to Nehemiah, Kebbi state has achieved more than three-fold improvement over Sokoto and Zamfara states due to intervention that was provided some years back by the European Union, where a lot of outreaches were done in hard-to-reach communities.
However, investigations conducted by ASHENEWS show that lack of awareness campaign is one of the major reasons why some children are not being immunized and have remained at zero dose immunization level.
It was observed that many parents are not properly enlightened on the importance of vaccinating their children.
Many of them have negative thoughts about immunization due to religious beliefs.
Our findings reveal that some parents are not able to vaccinate their children due to lack of knowledge or information; lack of time or other family issues and mistrust or fear of side reactions, misinformation and rumours, vaccination fatigue (too many rounds), inability to understand the benefits of vaccination, absence of vaccine card, service delivery issues such as distance and the insecurity challenges affecting the three states.
Another reason why some people are not able to get their children immunized is the security challenges affecting, not only Sokoto state, but and northern parts of the country.
Many families have abandoned their villages and fled to other places for fear of bandit attacks, as such, most of their children could not be vaccinated because they could not be located by healthcare workers.
Many attempts made by the healthcare workers to reach out to some children in the rural areas, ended up in vain as a result of bandit attacks.
Wurno, Rabah, Sabon-birni, Goronyo and Isa local governments areas in the Sokoto east are hard hit.
To address the non-compliance, continuous advocacy and engagements at all levels are important, as well as continuous engagement of community structures to promote the benefits of immunization.
Messages should continue to be sent to the general public to enlighten them of the benefits of immunizing their children.
There is the need to try and reach out to the communities with zero dose children, considering the fact that unprotected communities are not only potential epicenters of disease outbreaks, but they are also often deprived of other basic services and suffer from entrenched inequities.
There must be a collaborative effort across all government ministries, departments and agencies.
“By working together, we have a chance to leverage all our strengths to reach these communities with everything they need for a healthy, successful life, from nutrition and education to clean water to immunization.
Governments at all levels must provide adequate security in all the three states particularly those areas that are referred to as “red zone areas”.
Healthcare workers must be adequately protected to enable them to conduct their routine immunization without any hindrance.
The concerned authorities must ensure that all the internally displaced persons that cannot be reached by the healthcare workers are returned to their respective communities so that their children will be able to receive all the vaccine doses.
