The Game Changer [March 2012]: UNICEF Quarterly Newsletter on Polio Eradication Initiative in Nigeria

This newsletter from the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Nigeria features and discusses "game changing" initiatives as well as challenges and opportunities that the Nigerian Polio Eradication Initiative (PEI) is facing in its efforts to reach the global eradication goal. It is designed to serve as a tool to obtain periodic information updates and generally as a channel for improved interaction between PEI partners.

This particular edition of the newsletter - the first one issued - highlights some key initiatives, features stories showing the human face behind the data, and discusses difficulties faced in programme implementation. For example, continued community resistance to polio immunisation is impacting progress. Caregiver refusals to immunise their children still make up a significant proportion of the total number of children missed during campaigns in some high-risk areas. The challenges related to social mobilisation and communication issues have become complex at this end stage of the polio eradication programme.

However, as reported here, with the support of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), UNICEF, and PEI partners are starting to scale up a Volunteer Community Mobilizer Network targeting the most high-risk states - Kebbi, Kano, and Sokoto by March 2012, and Zamfara, Jigawa, Borno, Katsina, and Yobe by May 2012. This initiative is part of the Nigeria Polio Emergency Plan and aims to contribute to reducing the percentage of missed children through targeted interventions - house-to-house - to generate demand for and acceptance of the oral polio vaccine (OPV). In total, over 2,150 settlement-level volunteer mobilisers will be recruited, trained, and deployed in the settlements (villages) where high numbers of children are chronically being missed.

Specific contents include:

• "SITUATION: Facing challenges in community engagement whilst dealing with deteriorating security situation
• ANALYSIS: Nigeria is not heading for success unless its plan under development is made into something very special
• IN FOCUS: Accountability Framework: President Jonathan inaugurates a Presidential Task Force to eradicate polio
• SOCIAL MOBILIZATION: Over 2,150 Volunteer Community Mobilizers to be deployed in the most high-risk settlements
• CAPACITY BUILDING: Improving interpersonal communication skills to resolve persistent non-compliance
• ADVOCACY: Kaduna State calls for renewed commitment of LGA [local government authority] chairmen in the fight against polio
• FROM THE FIELD: Immunization Plus Days: the reality on the ground in one of the most high risk areas of Zamfara State"