Mobile brigades bring vaccines to Mozambique’s remotest regions

Zambézia, Mozambique - In the shade of a verdant tree, dozens of women and children from the Muebe community wait for the monthly visit of Oscar Emilio, a preventative medicine technician, on his motorbike. Oscar, 27, soon arrives on his Honda bearing a box laden with vaccines, needles, and other medical supplies.

In Mozambique, ‘mobile brigades’ - teams of doctors and health workers that move between communities - provide access to basic health services in the most remote areas. As a member of a mobile health brigade, Oscar rides between isolated farming communities in Zambezia province, vaccinating children who live far from hospitals and clinics.

From Muebe, Oscar says, “it is a 15 kilometre walk to the nearest healthcare centre for these women. With babies on their backs in the heat on bad roads, it takes six hours to walk there and back.”

This region of lush low-lying farmland is also subject to regular flooding in the rainy season. To reach Muebe today Oscar was forced to take an arduous route. “I had to travel 10 kilometres this morning on difficult roads. The road was blocked by water at different points, and I had to cross flooded sections twice by putting my motorbike in a canoe,” he says.

On his arrival, the women begin to queue up with the yellow vaccination cards in hand. “I treat 80 to 90 children on each visit to Muebe,” explains Oscar. “If there was no mobile brigade, many of these children would not be vaccinated. The mothers would turn to traditional healers instead.”

Vaccines remain the world's safest method to protect children from life-threatening diseases such as polio, measles, and hepatitis B. In Mozambique, coverage rates of some key vaccines have fallen from 91 per cent in 2019 to 67 per cent in 2022 due to the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic and a number of devastating cyclones. Mobile brigades like Oscar’s are helping to drive those numbers up once again. 

Oscar and his colleagues are having a significant impact on these rural communities. He says, “Now 100 per cent of the children in this community are getting vaccines and receiving them on time.”

Some grateful mothers in the crowd say that the service is saving lives in Muebe. Elazia Mandito Tavares, 23, has brought her 3-year-old boy Samuel for vaccination. She asserts that:

“Before the mobile brigade came around, some women in the community went to the traditional healers instead. They did not have the time or money to travel to the hospital - and some children lost their lives because of this.”

The mobile brigades are equipped and trained by UNICEF with the generous support of the Government of Ireland.