Katsina State has recorded 11 consecutive months without a new polio case, following a mass immunisation campaign that reached over 2.9 million children, a milestone announced on Friday by Heartland Alliance LTD/GTE to mark World Immunisation Week 2026 with the theme, “for every generation, vaccines work.”
Chief Executive Officer of HALG, Dr Bartholomew Ochonye, said the progress reflects years of targeted intervention in high-risk areas but stressed that the fight against polio remains fragile.
“Eleven months without a new polio case in a state that was once among Nigeria’s highest-risk geographies is real progress.
“But the poliovirus needs only one missed child to persist. Finding, counting, and planning for every child is not preparation for the real work; it is the real work, ”Ochonye said.
According to him, as of March 2026, the campaign alone, “over 2.9 million children were vaccinated across Katsina, contributing to the state’s current streak without a circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2) case.”
However, the campaign also exposed deep-rooted gaps in Nigeria’s immunisation system. HALG revealed that more than 50,000 children identified during the exercise had never received a single vaccine dose before the intervention.”
“These are not abstract numbers,” Ochonye said. “They are real children in hard-to-reach settlements, many of whom were never captured in official data. If they remain unreached, the risk remains.”
The intervention, which began in April 2025, involved over 4,000 field teams conducting house-to-house enumeration across 2,356 hard-to-reach settlements. The teams covered more than 836,000 households and vaccinated over 1.6 million children in the first phase alone, exceeding initial targets by 166 per cent.
Building on that effort, HALG led a statewide micro-planning exercise across all 34 local government areas in Katsina, physically mapping settlements to improve vaccination accuracy and ensure no community was left behind.
Public health experts say such granular planning is critical in northern Nigeria, where weak data systems, insecurity, and vaccine hesitancy have historically undermined immunisation efforts.
Global data further underscores the challenge. The World Health Organisation estimates that nearly 20 million children missed at least one vaccine dose in 2024, with over 14 million receiving none at all. A significant proportion of these children are believed to live in underserved communities in northern Nigeria.
Despite the gains in Katsina, HALG warned that major obstacles persist. Insecurity prevented access to some settlements during the initial phase of the campaign, while vaccine hesitancy, though reduced by 40 per cent through community engagement, remains a concern.
Cold chain limitations and weak health infrastructure also threaten the sustainability of progress, particularly in remote areas.
“The discovery of over 50,000 zero-dose children in just 17 local government areas points to a much wider national gap,” Ochonye said. “What we are seeing in Katsina is likely a reflection of what exists in other states at a similar scale.”
He called on federal and state governments, development partners, and the private sector to prioritise sustained funding for last-mile immunisation systems, including enumeration, community engagement, and monitoring.
“For every generation, vaccines work,” he added. “But generations are not abstract. They are specific children, in specific settlements, who may not even appear on a map. Our job is to find them, count them, and reach them consistently.”
Nigeria was declared free of wild poliovirus in 2020, but outbreaks of circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus have continued to pose a threat, particularly in northern states with low immunisation coverage.
Efforts to close these gaps have increasingly focused on identifying “zero-dose” children, those who have never received routine vaccines, through targeted outreach and improved data systems.
HALG, a public health organisation, has been at the forefront of these interventions, working with government agencies and international partners to strengthen community-based healthcare delivery.
Health experts warn that without sustained investment and political commitment, recent gains in states like Katsina could stall, risking a resurgence of preventable diseases.
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