Reaching the hard‐to‐reach mobile pastoralists with the most appropriate vaccination scheme in Central Africa

This consortium ‐ composed of members of four public health and veterinary institutes ‐ has the overall goal of increasing vaccination coverage among mobile pastoralists in Central Africa. In Chad with its high proportion of pastoralists, research and implementation partners have gained experience in well reaching pastoralists with joint human and animal vaccination campaigns, but a sustained strategy still needs to be better described before translation to policy. We hypothesize that the introduction of an assessed adult vaccination scheme will further increase the demand of pastoralists for vaccination services and lead to more frequent utilization of a mix between mobile, outreach and established fixed vaccination infrastructure. Given that one fifth of pastoralists regularly cross the country borders, Chad will initiate an exchange with its neighboring countries on how to serve pastoralist communities and on the appropriate vaccination scheme. Including adult vaccination ‐ among the ‘lost‐outs’.

Main beneficiaries are the pastoralists in remote zones as well as the vaccination services. This operational research will facilitate vaccination campaigns between the health and veterinary sectors in three zones and two years. The campaigns are assessed with qualitative and quantitative approaches regarding the knowledge and perceptions on adult vaccination; randomized surveys will indicate the achieved coverage of women (TT2+) and an in‐depth follow‐up of few families will further show whether the overall demand to vaccination could be increased when other adult vaccines are added to the schedule. We will disseminate our results to all stakeholders to further explore how accinations can be sustainably delivered to these hard‐to‐reach communities.