By Sara Seper, Senior Associate, Knowledge Management and Strategic Communications, MOMENTUM Integrated Health Resilience, and Didier Bagoro, Immunization Lead, MOMENTUM Integrated Health Resilience Burkina Faso

The devastating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic meant that countries around the world could not reach millions of children with essential immunization services, leaving them vulnerable to life-threatening, preventable diseases.

To address this challenge in Burkina Faso, MOMENTUM Integrated Health Resilience supported the country’s Ministry of Health and Public Hygiene (MOH) to develop a strategy to integrate COVID-19 vaccination campaigns with routine immunization efforts. This helped to maximize the use of resources to identify and vaccinate “zero-dose” and under-vaccinated children and their families.

Zero-dose children are those who are completely unvaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. A key goal of MOMENTUM, as part of its integrated approach to maternal and child health services, is to contribute to global efforts to reach children who are either zero-dose or under-vaccinated, as well as their families.

MOMENTUM supports COVID-19 vaccine campaigns in countries, like Burkina Faso, where immunization services have been greatly impacted by the pandemic. The country’s national COVID-19 vaccination coverage is around 11.7 percent, according to the MOH. Another major challenge for Burkina Faso’s MOH is combatting vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles and rubella, pneumonia, and poliovirus. To increase the number of individuals who received their second COVID-19 dose, as well as address barriers to reaching children for routine immunization, an integrated campaign providing both COVID-19 and routine vaccines was launched in December 2022 in five health districts in the country’s South-West Region.

MOMENTUM provided support to the MOH with preparing for campaign meetings, training staff on advocacy and outreach efforts to support immunization efforts, creating social mobilization, distributing vaccines and other commodities to ensure sufficient supplies, and supervising implementation. Community mobilizers supported by MOMENTUM played a critical role in the integrated campaign by spreading awareness and educating community members about the COVID-19 vaccine and routine immunizations. Outreach activities included advocacy meetings, radio programs, television broadcasts, and vaccination sessions in local villages and schools.

Tougué Kam, a nurse who oversees routine immunization in the South-West Region, said that he was “delighted with this campaign because it allowed the region to catch up with children who had been lost to vaccination follow-up, and to go to areas that had not been visited due to lack of resources.”

Implementing this campaign in Burkina Faso gave local health service providers the opportunity to strengthen their capacity to deliver immunization services to their communities and to understand the benefits of integrating COVID-19 vaccines with their routine immunization programs.

Within a period of just one week, the integrated campaign provided a total of 24,711 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine. Women accounted for 58 percent of adults vaccinated for COVID-19.

The integrated campaign also successfully traced and vaccinated thousands of children between 0-23 months for routine immunizations in the five regions, with a total of 22,010 total doses of various vaccines distributed during the campaign. Additionally, 5,307 nine-year-old girls were vaccinated against HPV, including 4,524 for their first dose and 783 who were administered their second dose.

“I am happy because I was able to vaccinate my child for his second dose of measles and I also received my dose of COVID-19,” said a mother from Kampti.

In all five health districts, because of the integrated campaign, there was an increase in the number of zero-dose children who received vaccinations from previous years. Based on the results in Burkina Faso, integrating COVID-19 vaccination with routine immunization efforts has the potential to better identify and vaccinate zero-dose and under-vaccinated children, as well as increase the number of COVID-19 vaccines provided to communities in the fragile settings where MOMENTUM works.