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Government has been urged to pay critical attention to the country's immunisation financing and programmes to reduce zero-dose children and eliminate preventable deaths.
This is because an increase in domestic resource mobilisation for immunisation financing, including new vaccines, would help sustain gains that had been made in the coverage of the vaccine preventable diseases (VPDs), since 1972.
The Director of Programmes of the Hope for Future Generations (HFFG), Nancy Ansah, made the call during a day’s capacity-building workshop for queenmothers on immunisation financing and awareness creation of new vaccines at Tuobodom in the Techiman North District in the Bono East Region last Wednesday.
The programme was organised by HFFG, a non-governmental organisation, and funded by Global Health Advocacy Incubator to implement the Financing Immunisation Advocacy Response (FAIR) project.
It is aimed at advocating increased domestic resource mobilisation and increased accountability for results in reaching zero-dose children as well as increasing immunisation coverage.
Mrs Ansah said it was crucial for the government to increase domestic resources mobilisation for immunisation financing to ensure availability of vaccines and other logistics for immunisation at all times.
The HFFG Director of Programmes explained that the workshop was also to create awareness of new vaccines such as the malaria and cervical cancer vaccines to help the participants to educate their communities to patronise them when the need arose.
Given the vulnerability of rural communities, Mrs Ansah explained that her organisation targeted the queenmothers because they played key roles and had influence on people in their communities, thus they would encourage their people to get immunised when needed.
She said it was the expectation that the participants would educate their community members on the importance of vaccines to enable them to see the need to participate in immunisation exercises.
On cervical cancer, Mrs Ansah said the disease was ranked as the second most frequent cancer among women in the country, explaining that girls, aged 15 years and above, were at risk of developing cervical cancer.
She said it was estimated that each year, 2,797 women were diagnosed with cervical cancer and 1,699 of them die because of the disease.
Mrs Ansah, therefore, urged the government to support screening and treatment centres at the district and sub-district levels since it required adequate funding.
The Techiman North District Director of Health, Jacob Monokpa, expressed concern about the low turnout for some vaccination programmes in the area, explaining that some parents were unable to bring their children for vaccination because of their farming activities.
Mr Monokpa expressed the hope that the workshop with the queenmothers and other stakeholders would help resolve the problem.
He also called on men to support their wives to send their children for vaccination and attend antenatal care.
The Member of Parliament (MP) for the area, Elizabeth Ofosu Agyare, said it was a fact that vaccine programmes had helped to eliminate several diseases and saved the lives of many children over the years.
She, therefore, appealed to the government to put in place measures to ensure the sustainability of the various vaccine programmes after the exit of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI).
Mrs Aygare explained that plans by GAVI, the largest external financier of immunisation, to exit soon would leave a wide funding gap that required critical attention from the government, if the country was to protect gains made in reducing mortality and morbidity due to vaccine-preventable conditions over the years.
