At the end of last year an alliance of partners working towards universal immunisation coverage (the Gavi Alliance) came together to assess progress and prioritise action. Save the Children’s briefing, Measuring progress on the pathway to universal immunisation coverage, explores the ‘progress and required action’ in a number of areas, including ensuring immunisation is in reach of all children, sustaining and growing immunisation programmes following transition from Gavi support, and vaccine affordability.

Save the Children are an important part of the Gavi Alliance and more about the progress of their work can be found here.

Within this document on measuring progress we were shocked to read that…

Nigeria has the highest number of under-immunised children in the world (4.3 million). Immunisation coverage is extremely low, with not even half of children receiving a full course of basic routine vaccinations. Based on current trends, our analysis shows that without significant action, coverage won’t even reach 50% by 2020. Nigeria is also home to the widest inequalities in immunisation coverage, with the north of the country falling far behind the south – for example, coverage is nearly five times higher in the South West than the North West, and nearly 28 times higher in Lagos state than Sokoto (80% vs 3% coverage). Children from the wealthiest households are six times more likely to be immunised than those from poorer households.

We have worked with some amazing teachers in Nigeria and have many contacts there. Like us, they believe that children themselves can understand and take action on the topic of immunisation. Often they are the ones taking care of younger children. They can find out and remind their family when to take babies and toddlers to be immunised and much more…

So we will endeavour to accelerate our plans to develop our 10 messages poster on Immunisation and maybe this could be something that could be used to help improve this statistic? Find out more about our Posters for Health.

This will be in the same style as our popular Nutrition Poster, Malaria Poster and Diarrhoea Poster.