Vaccination campaigns, especially in Nigeria, are a Herculean task, particularly when navigating complex and hard-to-reach terrains. From the planning stage, where primary healthcare workers identify households and calculate target populations for vaccination, the challenges are immense.
Khadija Ibrahim, a Ward Focal Person from Bagama A in Suleja Local Government Area (LGA), often braves rain and harsh weather conditions while moving from one community to another to identify households and target populations for vaccination. According to Khadija, although community leaders play crucial roles in identifying target populations, some gatekeepers can be reluctant due to a lack of incentives.
While community leaders need to support public health campaigns, Khadija lamented that “sometimes, your community leader does not want to accompany you, and you cannot enter without them.” This sometimes leads to inaccurate information and, in many cases, missed settlements during the vaccination campaign, which affects the spread of the Circulating Variant of Poliovirus and other vaccine-preventable diseases.
Due to the challenging terrain in rural areas, Ward Focal Persons often rely on motorcycles for transportation. “There was a year when I had an accident and dislocated my left wrist while distributing vaccines as early as 6 a.m.,” Khadija recalled. Given that all documentation for planning and implementing public health campaigns is done manually on paper, these documents are vulnerable to destruction by rain, accidents, or human errors.
“This manual method is difficult because sometimes you may go to a community and find that the number of children is not as high as the numbers given to us,” Abdullahi Muhammad, another Ward Focal Person, said. This affects reporting and vaccine management.
Muhammad supervises 14 vaccination teams, each visiting over 100 households for daily immunization rounds. He noted that “because the profiles of the settlements are captured manually, it’s difficult to understand the accessibility of these settlements, whether they are rural, urban, nomadic, or scattered.” These complications also impact the identification of starting points, midpoints, and endpoints during implementation.
The challenges in developing an effective microplan sometimes lead to the postponement of vaccination campaigns. Thus, the introduction of Planfeld—designed to enhance the planning of vaccination campaigns and ensure every child has access to the polio vaccine and other routine immunization services—comes at an opportune time.
Muhammad is among the first healthcare workers to express excitement about the Planfeld pilot. “Planfeld saves time; rather than spending four to five days developing a microplan, we can achieve it in just a few minutes,” he said.
Echoing this sentiment, Usman Abubakar, the Niger State Immunization Officer (SIO), remarked that the Planfeld pilot workshop is timely. He noted that digitizing micro plans will significantly address the issue of resource allocation, which he considers one of the most challenging tasks in his 20 years in the health sector.
Having spent nearly two decades leading and supporting vaccination campaigns across the state, Khadija, Umar, Usman, and other unsung heroes of public health interventions share one common aspiration.
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