Compendium of human Interest stories
Compendium provides a glimpse of how the sustained efforts of the GAVI-UNICEF partnership have touched the lives of many – across states, communities, and cultures
Highlights
Expanding access to immunization is crucial to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Immunization is one of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to protect children’s lives. More than half of the world’s most vulnerable children still miss out on the essential vaccines they need to survive and thrive. Globally, 1.5 million deaths could be avoided if children were vaccinated.
Realizing the right of every child, particularly the most marginalized, to immunization is UNICEF’s goal. As a technical partner to the national immunization programme of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India, UNICEF stands committed to ensuring no child suffers from diseases that can be prevented by vaccines.
As one of the founding partners of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, UNICEF has played a strategic role in enabling the partnership to expand its reach. The partnership is one characterised by high synergy and collaborative action. Globally, the partnership has made possible rapid gains in strengthening health systems to introduce new vaccines and close the immunization equity gap, deliver life-saving vaccines to the most vulnerable children, and ensure access to high-quality vaccines, immunization supplies and related services.
In India, the GAVI-UNICEF partnership supports the national immunization programme by empowering and leveraging grassroots civil society organizations and community-based organizations to conduct social mobilization activities toward increased demand for vaccines across the country.
In addition, with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the partners have deployed the wealth of knowledge and experience amassed from routine immunization interventions to accelerate awareness of COVID-19 appropriate behaviours and promote the uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine among communities.In doing so, their work spans 54 districts across the 14 states of Haryana, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, Bihar, and Odisha.
This compendium provides a glimpse of how the sustained efforts of the GAVI-UNICEF partnership have touched the lives of many – across states, communities, and cultures – presenting stellar accounts of all that community-led immunization interventions are capable of achieving. What follows, then, are some stories – ‘of the people, for the people, and by the people’.
