Christian Polio Eradication Partnership

In essence, UNICEF Angola's programme communication team sought to dispel growing misconceptions and rumours about vaccination, and to engage church organisations to participate in social mobilisation training and other activities. Because of the high level of illiteracy and poor media coverage in Angola, interpersonal communication channels were used to take messages to hard-to-reach areas and isolated populations.

Partnership was the central means of mobilising Angola's religious community to participate and to use its voice for polio eradication. UNICEF began by recruiting a senior member of the Catholic Church who had previously worked for UNICEF as a social mobilisation consultant. Using his contacts, a series of meetings was held with bishops from the Episcopal Conference of Angola and Sao Tome and with members of the Executive Board of the Council of Christian Churches of Angola (Protestant sect). Through the meetings, participants gradually worked towards a common understanding that the rumours around sterilisation were unfounded and that the vaccines were safe. In addition, the goal of saving lives through vaccination was linked to the basic values of Christianity, including the curative dimension of Christ's life, his love for children, and the social responsibility of the modern church. Participants explored ways of working together to promote these key points among their practitioners.

Having established these ties, the church's powerful voice and potent imagery was used as a communication strategy through the creation printed materials and the forging of interpersonal channels. As a first step towards dispelling rumours, a poster showing Mother Teresa administering the oral polio vaccine to a child in India and a pamphlet entitled 'What you do to these little ones, to Me you do' were developed and distributed in Catholic parishes throughout the country. Next, the church leaders were asked to nominate organisations within their respective churches that could work with the urgency that eradicating polio demanded. (UNICEF would provide the training, travel costs, and small fees for the coordination body.) The Catholic bishops first nominated the local branch of the Legion of Mary, which specialises in house visits for the sick and destitute, and later added the female branch of the Catholic Church called Promotion of the Catholic Women. The Council of Christian Churches of Angola nominated its Medical Council, an association of doctors and nurses from their congregations.

Having reached this point, the following steps were taken:

1. UNICEF and the respective church groups worked together to develop a joint project representing their shared vision of a polio-free world.
2. A training and travel plan was developed and 60 trainers (30 for each denomination) attended a series of sessions on training trainers.
3. The trainers travelled to 10 of the country's 18 provinces and conducted their own training seminars for over 20,000 mobilisers within their respective churches. These mobilisers then conducted outreach to individual families on a household-to-household basis.
4. Organisers advocated for the religious volunteers within the Ministry of Health with the hope that they would be fully accepted by health workers, who tended to regard the volunteers and mobilisers as intruders.

Immunisation & Vaccines, Children, Health.

Colonial religious restrictions had left Angola a predominantly Christian country (38% Roman Catholic, 15% Protestant, and 47% practising indigenous beliefs). Churches were considered to be important allies in that, as social structures, they extended from national to municipal and community levels. Furthermore, they could be mobilised rapidly enough to contribute to an emergency vaccination operation.

By 1998, Angola had suffered almost continuous civil war for more than 2 decades. This war made it imperative to enlist the help of committed, reliable, social mobilisers who were respected by their communities and by authorities from both sides of the conflict. Despite the devastation that the conflict had caused to infrastructure and the economy, the country had managed to hold national immunisation days (NIDs) for the previous 3 years. Nonetheless, a polio epidemic erupted; 2 major cities, Benguela and Luanda, were affected and 1,103 cases and 60 deaths were recorded.

As of March 2005, UNICEF has an ongoing agreement with Legion of Mary and a new one in discussion with Protestant churches. Furthermore, a new agenda has been signed to allow the activists' joint activities to continue. Under the agreement, each of the nominated religious organisations is pledging to engage 5 managers at the national level, 25 trainers at the provincial level, and 1,000 activists at the district and community levels in the partnership. The new recruits are expected to visit about 10,000 families (around 70,000 people) each month.