It was a great moment in Nigeria when Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote visited the Emergency Operations Centre for polio in Abuja.
Both billionaires have played a significant role in the fight to eliminate polio in Nigeria.
Gates, whose foundation has invested more than $1.6billion in Nigeria to date, is in the country to see first-hand the progress the country is making on primary healthcare provision, polio eradication, nutrition and financial inclusion.
They are expected to meet with government officials, and civil society and private sector stakeholders in Abuja and Lagos for talks to “finish the job of polio eradication” and keep the virus away from Nigeria’s children.
The EOC is central to coordinating long-running campaign to eradication polio from Nigeria—and has been active since polio emerged in 2016 in areas of Borno military forces reclaimed from Boko Haram terrorists.
Both billionaires held talks with the executive director of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency, Dr Faisal Shuaib.
“The only places in Nigeria where we have wild polio virus potentially circulating is in Borno,” Shuaib told Daily Trust after the talks which lasted an hour.
“We still have some local government areas [like] Bama, Ngala, Damboa where we have not had unfettered access to kids, and our concern is that unless these kids are vaccinated, there is always the potential that they could be harbouring wild polio virus.”
The 2016 discovery of polio virus among children born in communities under Boko Haram control and unvaccinated their entire life set back Nigeria’s progress to be polio free.
The federal government released N9.8 billion in funding to ensure the outbreak was contained.
“All of that funding, all of the work that went into containing that outbreak will go to naught unless we are able to finish the job in Borno,” said Shuaib.
The meeting also covered a post-polio Nigeria—what to do with the EOC, lessons learnt from polio eradication, and how to apply the “central command” strategy for polio control to other public health diseases.
Shuaib said the lessons are helping strengthen primary health care, following the launch of the Community Health Influencers and Promoters Service (CHIPS).
It came almost a year after the start of the Primary Health Care Revitalisation programme—with a target to have make functional some 10,000 primary health centres nationwide.
President Buhari launched the service in February during a state visit to Nasarawa and has mandated it be rolled out nationwide.
Credit: thenationonlineng.net
