Delivering high-quality immunisation services in border regions and hard-to-reach settings is not just a question of vaccine availability, but also of reach, timing, and consistency.
Population mobility and nomadic settlement patterns intensify this challenge in many border settlements. Communities are dispersed, movement is often seasonal, and outreach and mobile sessions cannot always be implemented as planned. These constraints are compounded by human-resource gaps, including staff shortages, high workloads, and limited continuity of service delivery teams, which result in some settlements being reached infrequently and children being missed during routine immunisation.
To better understand the drivers of poor vaccination coverage in Nigeria’s border states, SCIDaR conducted an assessment under its Routine Immunisation Intensification (RII) efforts. The assessment triangulated facility-level routine immunisation data, disease burden information, and real-time community data from CRoWN women to identify coverage gaps and better understand the underlying drivers of missed children in border communities.
While existing human resources and logistics gaps were already known contributors to poor immunisation coverage in border wards, the assessment further identified additional constraints, including limited access to functional health facilities due to insecurity, insufficient vaccine supply relative to population needs, and weak cold chain capacity in remote areas.
In response, SCIDaR recruited an additional 158 vaccinators and recorders and trained them between 19 and 23 January across seven states (Kebbi, Katsina, Jigawa, Zamfara, Borno, Sokoto, and Yobe), in collaboration with State Ministries of Health and State Primary Health Care Development Agencies.
The training strengthened competencies in fixed, outreach, and mobile service delivery; vaccine and cold chain management; safe injection practices; adverse events following immunisation (AEFI) management; infection prevention; waste management; teamwork; session planning; and the accurate use of routine immunisation data tools.
Early outcomes from this capacity strengthening are already evident. Across these seven LCB states, over 700 fixed, mobile, and outreach sessions have been conducted, reaching more than 4,000 children with polio vaccination, demonstrating how targeted investments in frontline capacity can translate into improved access in some of the hardest-to-reach communities.
