Photo: Children wait for vaccination. Cross River Primary Health Care Development Agency.
Ugep, a town in Nigeria’s Cross River state, has kept Africa's polio upsurge in the community at bay through trust of its localized leaders. In 2020, Nigeria was the last African country to eradicate the disease; however, by Spring 2022 1,060 polio cases were reported in Nigeria, with variants in 29 out of 36 African states. In April 2022, Ugep's monarch declared every mother with a child between the ages of 0 and 59 months to get the polio vaccination. Through community trust in local leadership, families poured in to receive the dose. The state of Cross River's government provides polio prevention training to traditional leaders, who then relay the information to their chiefs and prepare communities for vaccination. The strategy has proved effective, where "no less than 900,000 children have received both set of inoculations," reports Dr. Ekpenyong, director general of the Cross River State Primary Health Care Development Agency, which coordinates the mass vaccinations. In a state with widely varying languages, customs, and cultures, the reliance on training local leaders has been critical to the health campaign's success.
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