HANOI, November 10, 2022 — Today, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology (NIHE) hosted their Final dissemination workshop for the USAID MOMENTUM Routine Immunization Transformation and Equity project in Vietnam. The project provided technical assistance to support the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in five hard-to-reach, mountainous provinces: Dien Bien, Son La, Hoa Binh, Quang Nam, and Ninh Thuan.

MOMENTUM Routine Immunization Transformation and Equity aims to strengthen routine immunization programs to overcome the entrenched obstacles contributing to stagnating and declining immunization rates and address the barriers to reaching zero-dose and under-immunized children with life-saving vaccines. The project, implemented by JSI Research & Training Institute, Inc. along with PATH, Accenture Development Partnerships, Results for Development, CORE Group, and The Manoff Group, also provides strategic technical support for COVID-19 vaccination programs and supports countries to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on immunization services.

Although the project engagement time was quite short—merely nine months of activities with six months of full cover in all five project provinces—the project’s pace and intensity were immense. Some 7,712 health and non-health staff were fully trained on COVID-19 vaccination techniques and 1.7 million unvaccinated or under-vaccinated individuals were identified. From there, the project supported 1,318 mobile vaccination sites to provide 738,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to them. These last-mile COVID-19 vaccination efforts will continue even after the project concludes; healthcare staff in the five project provinces were also equipped with state-of-the-art digital tools that MOMENTUM developed to help them microplan and report data on a daily basis. The tool is also a mechanism of multi-sectoral coordination with strong support and commitment from local People’s Committees. The project hopes to scale up its intervention model to other provinces and be a helpful reference for other countries where a COVID-19 vaccination campaign is ramping up.

USAID/Vietnam’s Deputy Mission Director Bradley Bessire, NIHE Director Prof. Dang Duc Anh, and other leaders and healthcare officers from the Ministry of Health, General Department of Preventive Medicine, and national/regional offices of the Expanded Program on Immunization, provincial Departments of Health, provincial Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, and UNICEF attended the workshop.

Deputy Director Bradley Bessire said, fundamental to the success of MOMENTUM’s work in Vietnam is the strong partnership with the Vietnamese government, at the national and local level, to implement activities tailored to address the unique needs in each of five focus provinces to respond to the COVID-19. We hope that the results will be shared, replicated, and maintained in the five provinces and expanded to other provinces across Vietnam.

Prof. Dang Duc Anh expressed his appreciation for the tremendous achievements in the last twelve months in the five provinces and deeply thank the support from USAID and MOMENTUM project. He also acknowledged MOMENTUM’s contribution toward strengthening health staff capacity building, efficient microplanning for the vaccination campaign, and improving vaccination coverage for all. He also recognized the series of supportive supervisions undertaken to ensure safe and effective deployment of the various types of COVID-19 vaccines, especially for vulnerable and hard-to-reach populations, including the elderly, under-served populations, and people with disabilities, to ensure equity of access to COVID-19 vaccinations.

Through the American Rescue Plan Act, USAID supports Vietnam’s COVID-19 response and helps accelerate equitable access to and delivery of safe and effective doses of COVID-19 vaccines. USAID also helps strengthen Vietnam’s health system capacity to respond to COVID-19 and detect and monitor future disease threats.