Dear Chairperson:
My WHO AFRO colleagues and I were honored and excited to be part of the joyful celebration by our Member States and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative partners of the historic achievement last year, of the certification of regional interruption of wild poliovirus.
Decades of hard work by governments, partners, communities, and frontline health workers made this momentous global health milestone possible.
To finish polio once and for all, we are supporting the response to outbreaks of circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 that have affected 20 African countries since 2018.
These outbreak response activities were paused in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, but since resuming last July, more than 40 million children have been reached and transmission appears to be slowing.
I would like to thank the governments and partners for having responded to our call to innovate, adjust and restart campaigns.
I am hopeful that with strong outbreak response efforts and the additional tool of the novel oral poliovirus vaccine type 2, we can end all forms of polio in the African Region.
Regarding polio transition, it will be very important to ensure that the understandable and inevitable shift in resources is managed in a way that sustains the tremendous achievements made.
The polio programme’s contribution to other health programmes has been significant and continues, and these contributions highlight the interconnectedness of the triple billion pillars and the importance of working in integrated ways going forward.
This is reinforced in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, we know that two of three polio personnel at the national and district levels in our country offices in the Region are spending more than half their time on the COVID-19 response.
We see the polio team’s contributions across the triple billion pillars:
In relation to universal health coverage, the programme’s unparalleled footprint serves as an entry point to increasing access to immunization, deworming and treatment for diarrhoea, particularly in rural and hard to reach communities.
On pillar two on emergency preparedness and response, polio colleagues are the main frontline workers in our region responding to outbreaks of cholera, yellow fever and meningitis.
On pillar three, the polio team’s capacities to reach underserved communities have been leveraged to deliver micronutrient supplements and messaging on iodization of salt and the determinants of health.
In the African Region we intend to sustain these contributions, in addition to sustaining polio certification activities like surveillance. Our restructuring of the Regional Office as part of our regional and now the global Transformation programme, and the implementation of the functional reviews of country offices, will facilitate this.
The polio programme has been unique in how it has innovated, and these innovations, like the use of geographic information systems, are serving many programmes in our Region.
I would like to add that the rigor with which the performance of the polio programme and of its personnel have been assessed, provide lessons in accountability (which has been a key theme of the Executive Board discussions this week). We will use the polio experience to inform our improvement of accountability across our work in the Region.
Having understood the contributions of the polio programme, we are convinced that polio transition is a good investment, as it will deliver on outcomes related to universal health coverage, health security and health promotion including the COVID-19 vaccine delivery.
We encourage partners who are interested in achieving strong outcomes across the triple billion pillars, to continue investing and working with us in supporting polio transition in the Region even as we encourage our Member States also to invest in it.
I thank you very much, Chair.