Diphtheria: Only 42% of children under 15 in Nigeria are fully protected—Save the Children

By Tobias Lengnan Dapam

Save the Children has said that only 42% of children
under 15 in Nigeria are fully protected from diphtheria.

SCI Chief Impact Officer,Ebrima Saidy, stated this on Wednesday in Abuja.

He said in most recent outbreak, 80% of the confirmed cases have been found to be people who are unvaccinated.

Speaking further, he said over 7,200 cases and over 450 deaths have been confirmed since the outbreak started.

Saidy, said three in every four confirmed cases or 73.6% of all cases are of children under 14, with those aged between 5-14 years bearing the brunt of the disease.

“Diphtheria is a vaccine-preventable disease that has largely been eradicated across the world, although periodic outbreaks happen in places where large groups of children have missed this routine vaccination”.

Speaking on humanitarian response program, he said SCI provided life-saving humanitarian assistance and responded to emergencies, with the primary goal of supporting children, families, and their communities to become resilient and have an improved access and services to their basic needs for survival, learning and protection.

“Since January 2023, SCI has made significant strides in reaching out to those in need, with a total outreach of over 1,590,047 individuals (64% children), emphasizing the organization’s childcentrality in its humanitarian efforts.

“In order to be responsive to the evolving humanitarian needs in Nigeria, SC’s approach to scaling up operations integrates strategic foresight, which is more centric to triple nexus (humanitarian, development, and peace building) and high field-level efficiency, characterized by the locally led responses and partner led implementation.”

While expressing worry about the rampant cases of early child marriage, he said the country contributes one of the largest number of early, child and forced marriages and out of school children to the global caseload.

“Early child and forced marriage robs the potential of girls to realize and release their full potentials. Child marriage erodes and dries the future of the girls, their dreams and hope in life. “

He said one of the girls who unfortunately end up in early, child and forced marriage could possibly be someone who invents and have a solution for some of the major challenges that the world is facing today. “So, the planet earth needs these girls in order to be a better place for everyone to live on.

“On our part, we need a lot of investment in the northeast and other part of the country. We need to work more with donors, partners and the government to achieve results.

“We also need more funding to be able to solve child related challenges in the country.”