In every generation, vaccines work.
This World Immunization Week, CVD-Mali celebrates the power of immunisation to protect children, families, and communities and to save lives across generations.
That celebration, however, comes also with a reminder – that progress must be protected. Too many children still miss out on vital, potentially lifesaving vaccines because of insecurity, distance, weak systems, and inequity.
CVD-Mali’s commitment remains clear: to strengthen delivery, improve data quality, and help ensure that every child is reached with life-saving vaccines.
Vaccination is one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal as public health agents and, during World Immunization Week, CVD-Mali is proud to stand with health workers, communities, and partners who work every day to ensure that children are protected, even in the most challenging settings.
Reaching every child requires more than vaccines alone, however. It also requires trust, strong systems, reliable data, and sustained commitment.
That is how we protect progress and build healthier futures.
Expanding focus
In the course of its REACH Mali work distributing azithromycin for child survival throughout the country, CVD-Mali teams often come across children who haven’t received a single dose of routine vaccinations. Not a single one.
We join the REACH Network, then, in expanding the focus of World Immunization Week, and our work more broadly, onto one of the most urgent challenges in global health: reaching these zero-dose children, who are highly vulnerable to preventable diseases.
If the aim is to save lives, we must act with equitable, integrated strategies, and prioritise children in remote, underserved, high-risk communities who are still being missed.
In Mali, the reality is stark: we know that too many of our young are not getting the treatments they need.
And yet, there is hope, and more integrated, targeted approaches can close persistent gaps in coverage.
Community networks
REACH Mali is able to carry out its mammoth mass drug administration thanks to the extensive community networks and local delivery strategies it has developed and honed, and these are capable of operating even in hard-to-reach and challenging settings.
So the fact that we are now finding so many zero-dose children is actually encouraging, in fact – it means that they can now receive treatment.
Rather than creating parallel systems, REACH Mali integrates its azithromycin-based child survival intervention with existing, routine systems, including vaccination and nutrition programmes.
Equity and efficacy
This allows multiple interventions to be delivered together, through a single, coordinated platform.
And, slowly but surely, we are making progress.
In the meantime, every missed child is a reminder that equity must remain at the centre of all immunization efforts.
This World Immunization Week, CVD-Mali reaffirms its commitment to supporting stronger immunisation systems, better use of data, and practical approaches to reaching children and communities too often left behind.
Because vaccines work – on the condition that they get to everyone.
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