Charlotte Mbuh at Africa CDC’s webinar: What communities are teaching us about immunization uptake

Ahead of African Vaccination Week 2026, Africa CDC convened a webinar on success stories in immunization, hosted by Dr. Folake Olayinka, Director of Immunization at Africa CDC. In this session, Charlotte Mbuh of The Geneva Learning Foundation shares what frontline health workers and communities in Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are already teaching the sector about how to reach zero-dose and under-immunized children. Drawing from two peer learning initiatives carried out under the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030, in partnership with the Ministries of Health of Nigeria and DRC, UNICEF, and with support from Gavi, Charlotte presents the evidence generated by health workers themselves. In this presentation, you will learn: - How 4,434 health workers across all 36 states of Nigeria and more than 300 Local Government Areas produced 409 root cause analyses of priority immunization challenges in 2024. - How 2,779 health workers across 25 provinces of DRC identified zero-dose situations and reached more than 70,000 zero-dose and under-immunized children within a 30-day implementation cycle in 2025. - Why what looks like vaccine hesitancy is often a staffing gap, a poor service experience, or a planning failure rather than a demand problem. - How religious and traditional leaders, women’s groups, and local communicators act as critical partners for trust in fragile and conflict-affected settings. - Why 628 civil society organizations joining the Nigeria Immunization Collaborative, with 65 percent working at Local Government Area or facility level, matters for finding, reaching, and staying with missed families. Charlotte’s central argument is direct. The problem is often not a shortage of solutions. It is a shortage of connection between local knowledge and system action. Zero-dose children are rarely beyond reach. They are beyond routine visibility. The presentation closes with a call to treat frontline health workers and communities as knowledge partners, not only as delivery channels, and to make the search for zero-dose children a citizen’s issue, not only a health sector issue. Speaker: Charlotte Mbuh, The Geneva Learning Foundation. Host: Dr. Folake Olayinka, Director of Immunization, Africa CDC. Event: Africa CDC webinar on success stories in immunization, ahead of African Vaccination Week 2026. Learn more about The Geneva Learning Foundation: https://www.learning.foundation. Chapters: 00:00 Introduction by Dr. Folake Olayinka 00:30 Peer learning in Nigeria and DRC under the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 02:00 What frontline health workers are already teaching us 04:00 What builds trust in vaccines: listen, partner, adapt 06:00 How civil society helps find, reach, and stay with zero-dose families 08:00 The lesson for Africa: connect local knowledge with system action 10:00 Closing thought: a citizen’s issue #AfricanVaccinationWeek #ImmunizationAgenda2030 #ZeroDose #AfricaCDC #CommunityHealth #PeerLearning