Targets 500,00 children in North East for resilience education 
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has disclosed that two million Nigerian children are still at zero dose or unimmunised.
  
In partnership with Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the Fund has launched the second phase of the Multi-Year Resilience Programme (MYRP), targeting 500,000 school-age children in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states.
  
Chief of Lagos Field Office, Celine Lafoucriere, stressed the need for stronger immunisation to bridge the gap and address preventable diseases. 
  
Speaking during the World Immunisation Week and #Walk for Polio in Lagos State, she stated: “As we walk today, we call for stronger routine immunisation systems to be made possible through a renewed political commitment to ensure greater health education. 
  
“UNICEF continues to stand with Lagos and the Nigerian people to deliver vaccines to the hardest-to-reach children through vaccination campaigns, support health workers with training and resources, and build trust in every community so that no child is left behind.”
  
Specifically, she recalled that since 1974, vaccines have saved over 150 million lives!
  
“That represents more than three million lives per year or six lives every minute, in the last five decades. Vaccines are extremely powerful. Thanks to global efforts, the world has seen a 99.9 per cent reduction in polio cases since 1988,” she noted.

Before the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, she added, 1,000 children were paralysed every single day, adding that today, the “oral polio vaccine has helped prevent 24 million cases of paralysis.”
  
However, Lafoucriere expressed concern over the resurgence of polio in Lagos.
  
To her, low immunisation coverage, poor sanitation and malnutrition are keeping the door open for polio and other vaccine-preventable diseases, asserting: “Routine immunisation is our best bet.”
  
Calling for more enlightenment on vaccines, she observed: “Despite that vaccines are powerful, proven life saviours, some parts of the population remain misinformed, believing in harmful rumours. Despite that vaccines are increasingly available, some parts of the population only have access to vaccines during campaigns. This is not sustainable!
  
“Routine immunisation must become the norm for every child born in Lagos. This is the only way to ensure a calendar of vaccination can be established for every child, ensuring that vaccination is indeed powerful!”

IMPLEMENTATION of the three-year project in 291 local councils, aims at building on the efforts and achievements recorded in the first phase last November.
  
Unveiling the resilience education programme, yesterday, in Maiduguri, UNICEF’s Chief of Education, Vanessa Lee, revealed: “It will promote access to basic education to the vast number of out-of-school children in the conflict-affected states in the region.”
  
She stated that as education cannot wait, the implementation of MYRP will also promote access to basic education for boys and girls in the North East.